


That Ocean Is Not Silent

by bluestar



Series: From Out the Ocean Risen [1]
Category: Pacific Rim
Genre: Gen, Podfic Welcome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-23
Updated: 2013-08-15
Packaged: 2017-12-21 03:16:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 21
Words: 33,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/895144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluestar/pseuds/bluestar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Creating a safe bond between humans in the Drift is hard enough. No matter how great the need, some paths aren't meant to be taken.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>----</p>
<p>Like the story? Want it in book form? Pick up a copy <a href="http://tinyurl.com/hvpftj3">here!</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

1.

 

            He wasn’t sure when the dreams started, only when they started to get worse. They had a running theme. Darkness, coldness, pressure. Unbelievable pressure. He moved slowly through the crushing dark, blind and…not quite afraid. Wary, that was the feeling. Wariness of his surroundings as he wandered, lost and alone. And the silence, the maddening silence. He wanted to claw at his head and cry out when the silence pressed down on him, suffocating. He raised his head and stared up into the starless dark, opening his mouth and  _screaming-_

_“HFFGH!”_

Newt rolled off his bed and onto the floor, clipping his head on the way down on the nightstand. He groaned miserably and curled up into a tight ball, pressing a hand to the throbbing lump he could almost feel rise under his palm. There was a sharp rapping on his door.

            “S’open.”

            Gottlieb poked his head into the room with his face fixed in a scowl. He always had a look of moderate bitter annoyance, but at two in the morning it had sharpened to murderous levels.

            “I trust you’re aware of the time.”

            “I’m fine, thank you for your concern,” Newt said, rolling onto his stomach and pushing himself up to kneel. “I’m touched, Hermann. Thank you.”

            “Yes, yes,” Gottlieb said dismissively, limping into the room and hoisting Newt up by his arm, pushing him indelicately onto the bed. Newt fell back and lay staring up at the ceiling, crushing his hands against his eyes. Between the knock to the head and the lingering fragments of nightmare, he was exhausted to the core.

            “I feel like shit.”

            “Well, if you would stop imbibing those disgusting energy drinks of yours an hour before you go to bed, I’m fairly certain your repose wouldn’t be as disturbed.”

            “Jesus, was that even a real sentence? Are you just stringing big words together because they sound nice?”

            Newt sat up, pulling his blankets around him like a cloak. He grimaced as he felt how sweat-soaked they were and flung them off, and they slid off his bed in a tangle. He was aware of Gottlieb observing him and he glanced up in annoyance. He was surprised to see the man looking almost concerned.

            “You do look a bit ill.”

            “Bad dream, that’s all,” Newt said. “I’m fine. Why are you even still in here?”

            Gottlieb’s concern fell away at once, and he turned clumsily on his heel.

            “Well, forgive me for having some thought for a colleague’s welfare,” he snapped. “If you go into convulsions, do try to keep it down.”

            “Good  _night,_  Hermann,” Newt called as the bedroom door slammed shut. He fell back onto the bed, staring at the featureless ceiling. He rubbed at his eyes until they started to ache too, adding to the pain until it felt like his head was going to burst.

            Picking the blankets up off the floor, Newt wrapped himself up tightly and tried to go back to sleep.

 

 

* * *

 

 

             _“With the Breach sealed at last in a daring final act against the kaiju threat, many people are now wondering – where do we go from here? The global economy, in shambles from years of funding projects such as the Jaeger program, faces the daunting challenge of reaching stability in a post-war world-“_

            The television droned on and Newt barely paid it any attention, sipping at coffee so burnt and bitter it would have been more refreshing to chew on a charcoal briquette.

 “You need to stop making breakfast,” he said to Gottlieb. The man gave him a disdainful look, pushing a plate of toast and eggs at him.

            “If you’d take a turn cooking, you wouldn’t have to suffer through my attempts,” he said. “Eat your eggs, you look peaky.”

            “Don’t mother me, Hermann,” Newt groaned, pressing the warm mug against his temple. The heat soothed his lingering headache. “I literally don’t have the strength to deal with you today.”

            “So then the lab will be a place of peace and silence,” Gottlieb replied dryly. “I may even be able to work without interruption from you every five minutes.”

            “Work,” Newt echoed sourly. “What work? The Throat’s collapsed, the kaiju are gone. They’ll be packing us up and off-base soon enough.”

            Gottlieb eased himself into the chair opposite Newt, shoveling food into his mouth.

            “Packing  _you_  up, perhaps,” he said around a mouthful of eggs. “Not much need for an expert whose subjects of study have been effectively burnt to dust by atomic fire.”

            “Don’t be poetic. I will pay you ten bucks  _right now_  to stop being poetic.”

            Gottlieb paused mid-bite, lowering his fork as he regarded Newt. His eyes narrowed and a shade of the concern he’d shown earlier flickered over his face again.

            “Newton, you really do look ill. Is there…something wrong? You  _can_  tell me. I’ll barely ridicule you at all.”

            Newt smiled unexpectedly, shifting the coffee mug against his temples. No matter how belligerent they behaved towards one another, that tenuous initial thread of respect had grown into something stronger after Drifting together. However brief and painful it had been, it had changed something between them.

            “Do you…dream, about it? Everything that’s happened?”

            Gottlieb toyed with his food absently.

            “It is hard to live in the conditions we have and not carry some of the weight beyond waking hours,” he said eventually. “The death, destruction, the constant fear…one would have to be as a stone, not to be troubled by it. Stronger constitutions than mine have been broken by this war.”

            “Yeah, but…” Newt sighed, setting his mug down. He watched a thin ribbon of steam curl into the air, and tried to ignore the subtle headache that had firmly settled itself behind his eyes. “I mean…the Drift. The memories we shared with each other. The…the kaiju’s.”

            “I do,” Gottlieb admitted, sounding uncomfortable. “Though my dreams are of no great consequence. Fragments of memories, impressions. Yours, mainly.”

            “Anything interesting?”

            “Mostly how you attended protests during university to better ingratiate yourself with the fairer sex,” Gottlieb said dryly. “Though I don’t seem to recollect any such endeavors actually succeeding.”

            Newt shrugged gamely, grinning.

            “You can’t blame me for trying.”

            “Insufferable. Absolutely insufferable.”

            They finished breakfast in companionable silence, and Newt, without a single complaint, finished all his coffee. 


	2. Chapter 2

2.

 

            As usual, Newt’s side of the lab was a chaotic mess. The carcass he had been dissecting had finally been retired to a dozen separate specimen tanks though the smell of it lingered. Newt sat listlessly at his desk, doodling on a notepad; across the room where chaos ended and obsessive order began, Gottlieb was absorbed in theories and the music of chalk against the blackboards.

Newt had always liked to watch him work, even when they had been constantly on the verge of killing each other. It was like watching a master artist at his craft. Gottlieb revered numbers; his expression grew rapt, eyes wide and unblinking as he ran streams of numbers through his mind and out through graceful sweeping gestures, grinding sticks of chalk to dust one after the other. There was no other God nor faith good enough for Gottlieb – hosannas and prayers in the form of calculations, that was his religion.

            Finishing his doodle with a flourish, Newt pushed his chair back from his desk and rolled towards the looming line of specimen tanks. The organs and parts floated in vomit-yellow preservative, catching the light and glistening. Ruined meat in glass tubes, stripped off the defeated. Looted. Defiled. Dead.

 

             _deaddeaddead cold dark     alone_

 

            Newt sat up straighter, blinking and shaking his head. Well,  _that_  train of thought had gone someplace weird.

            “Hey, I’m...uh. I'm gonna go get lunch. You want anything?”

            Gottlieb ignored him.

            “Hermann. Food. Yummies. Hermann want yummies?”

            “I thought you were too ill to be annoying today.”

            “Look, either tell me now or I’m not bringing anything back.”

            “Sandwich. And tea, if there actually is any.”

            “We’re in Hong Kong,” Newt said dryly, sliding off the chair and giving the specimens an uneasy look before heading out the door. “I’m sure I can find you some oolong somewhere.”

            The Shatterdome never slept. Twenty-four hours a day there was construction, repair, training – it never stopped. The war had ended but vigilance would never cease; Newt had watched the press conferences and news pieces with Herc Hansen decrying the Jaeger program’s decommissioning, and his demands for it to be reinstated. All around the world the public cried out with him, and the shattered economy had coughed up a little more in the name of security and safety. The old Jaegers were gone, and it was going to take a lot of work to improve and replace them.

            That was why Newt and Gottlieb still had jobs with the Corps, really. The door had been slammed shut when the Breach was closed but they hadn’t barred the way. No one even knew how the Breach had opened the first time. Who was to say it wouldn’t happen again? So here in Hong Kong Newt stayed, though as every day passed he felt more and more irrelevant.

Every other part of the Shatterdome thrived – recruits to the new piloting programs were coming in daily. The tight quarters were almost claustrophobic now, and as Newt weaved in and around equipment and people he found himself wishing for a kaiju alarm to clear the decks. He narrowly missed being crushed by a forklift on the bay floor as he took a shortcut across to the galley, and turned around to yell at the driver. The forklift trundled on, and all around him people were streaming towards the massive bay doors.

Curiosity made him look, and sudden terror made him freeze. He stood rooted to the spot as the bay doors opened and a massive wreck of metal was slowly dragged inside. The blood pounded in his temples and fixed into a knot of pain behind his left eye, every heartbeat making his vision throb in and out of focus.

“That’s Gipsy Danger’s arm,” he said. His voice cracked on the name.

“Hey, Doctor Geiszler. Don’t see you down here very often.”

Shaking off the sense of dizzying shock, Newt glanced over his shoulder to find Tendo Choi grinning at him. He nodded up towards the arm, strapped to a massive flatbed.

"Pretty cool seeing it again, huh? Took forever to dredge up."

It was damaged almost beyond recognition, but Newt knew what it was. The chainsword at Gipsy’s wrist was stained and crusted blue, and looking at it made Newt shudder.

“Doctor? Hey, you okay?”

Tendo’s hand on his shoulder jarred Newt back to reality, and he turned around quickly. The administrator looked at him worriedly.

“You okay?” he repeated. “You’re lookin’ a little pastier than usual.”

“Yeah. I’m just…I’m having a really off day,” Newt said, glancing quickly over his shoulder again. The dark blue crust made his stomach lurch. “I was…I was just heading. Uh. To the mess. Get some food.”

“I’ll go too. Make sure you don’t keel over,” Tendo said. They swept off the floor quickly, Tendo having to jog to keep up with Newton’s pace. The heavy, vault-like door slammed behind them as they left the bay, and Newt leaned against it. He took a shaky breath, knuckling his left eye as the pain eased.

“Why did they bring it back here?” he asked Tendo, pushing away from the door and walking again. The administrator shrugged, smiling a little.

“Gipsy saved the day, y’know? It’s good for morale to have even a little part of her back with us. Plus…well. You know how strapped we are for materials. We might have to start cannibalizing the old wrecks. And attack sites.” He frowned a little at that, shaking his head. “They better leave the bridge alone.”

“Bridge?”

“Yeah, the Golden Gate. Trespasser ripped through it like tissue paper. Cables, beams, everything’s still the way it was after the attack.”

The galley was as bustling as the corridors, but Tendo cut through the lines guiltlessly and grabbed two trays, nodding towards an empty spot on the benches. Newt took a long drink of water, and felt the last of his nerves settle down again.

“You were there, weren’t you?” he asked Tendo as they ate. “You saw it happen.”

“Yeah,” Tendo said. “Hell of a thing. Watched that son of a bitch crest out of the water and smash through the bridge...then the city. You think you get used to seeing them, y’know? But you never do. Every time a kaiju came out of the water, I felt the same way I did when Trespasser came.”

“How did you feel?” Newt asked, toying with his food. He couldn’t seem to summon any appetite. Tendo took a bite of his own lunch, shaking his head slightly.

“Scared,” he said. “And irrelevant. Something that big, it doesn’t come for one person. It comes for  _everybody_. Everything you are, everything you ever did in your life doesn’t mean a thing to something like that. It’s like watching an atom bomb fall towards you.”

“No place to run,” Newt said, staring down at his tray. His hands were knotted into fists on the table, and the flourish of one of his tattoos peeked out from under his sleeve. “So all you can do is watch it fall.”

“Pretty much,” Tendo said soberly. Newt rubbed at his left eye again, all thought of eating abandoned.

“It came for  _me_ , though,” he said absently. Tendo gave him a curious look.

“Sorry?”

“The…uh. Nothing. Ignore me, I’m operating on five Red Bulls and three hours sleep,” Newt said, smiling a little as he grabbed his tray and stood. “Forget it. Thanks for lunch, though. I’ll feed it to Hermann, he thinks he can live on chalk dust.”

 “See you, Doc. Try and get some sleep, you look ready to drop.”

Cutting across the Jaeger bay floor cut twenty minutes off the walk to the labs, and Newt usually took the route every day. As he left the galley, he took every back passage he knew, feeling as though he had to hide from the very thought of Gipsy Danger’s arm sitting passive and broken on the flatbed.


	3. Chapter 3

3.

 

        The quarters Newt and Gottlieb shared were spacious by Shatterdome standards, but that wasn’t saying much. A kitchenette that doubled as a cramped living room – they used the chairs to eat at the table or sit in front of the small television – a bathroom, and their separate bedrooms. The fact that they had to share not only their lab but living spaces was not something either of them had been enthusiastic about, originally; Jaeger pilots got their own private quarters after all. But funding loss meant corners were cut at every possible turn, the barracks included. With no alternative aside from camping out in the lab itself, they had adjusted to it and just tried not to trip over each other.

            Newt had volunteered dinner duty and washing up, mostly hunting for things to do to distract himself from his headache and the overall discomfort of the day. Gottlieb had brought his work home with him, so to speak, scribbling line after line of numbers. Sometimes he’d fill whole pages in his notebook, stare at them, then frown and rip the entire thing out and start again.

“Are you reworking string theory over there?” Newt asked. Gottlieb muttered a few numbers out loud before his mind clicked back into English.

“-sevenandtwentyoverfifty What?”

Newt grinned, taking the balled-up papers and tossing them one by one into the wastebasket.

“You’ve been blazing through that stuff all day, give it a rest before you burn your brain out.”

“That may be a danger for  _you_ ,” Gottlieb said sarcastically, bending over his notebook again. “I, however, can actually handle the immense workload.”

Pitching the final paper ball and sighing as it bounced off the rim, Newt turned back to the sink and finished the washing up.

“They brought in part of Gipsy Danger today,” he said, feeling his mouth go dry at the thought. “Tendo said they might start scrapping the old Jaegers to recycle parts.”

“Unsurprising. Constructs as massive as Jaegers require materials that are in short supply. Half the reason they decommissioned the program was for lack of resources.”

“Yeah, then they went and funded the Walls of Life,” Newt muttered. “In the history of stupid ideas that one’s king. Who builds walls to keep out invasions?”

“It worked to keep the Mongols from China,” Gottlieb said dryly.

Newt snorted, drying the last dish with a snap of the dishtowel. Orange light from the setting sun poured in through the open window, and the sea was streaked with fire as it sank below the horizon. Newt watched the sunset thoughtfully, ignoring the garish city lights as they flickered on like beacons in the gathering dark.

            If he squinted, he could just barely make out the silhouette of the kaiju skeleton in the slums. He smiled sourly as he remembered Hannibal Chau and his shop, and wondered if everything he’d stripped off the dead like an opportunistic vulture were still there. Honestly, if anyone went in there to break the operation up, he would still love to get his hands on-

 

_cold     cold   alone darkness   alone   painpainpainpain_

 

“ _Shit.”_

Gottlieb looked up, first in annoyance, then genuine concern.

“Newton, you’re bleeding!”

A hot streak of blood oozed from Newt’s nose and he hurriedly pressed the dishtowel against it to stem the flow. Pain like an icepick behind his left eye made him swoon against the wall, and he fought to catch his breath.

“I am  _not_  having a good day today,” he said, half-aware of Gottlieb pushing him down into the open chair. “Jesus Christ on a  _bike_  that hurts.”

“Has this been happening often?”

“No, the nosebleed’s new. Must have some kind of weird sinus infection or something.”

Gottlieb gave him a supremely skeptical look, and Newt glared back.

“What? Not everything has a great exciting cause, Hermann. I’ve been feeling like crap for days.”

“Then perhaps an early retiring to bed and taking a few days to rest are in order.”

“What did I say about mothering me?”

“I’m not  _mothering you!_ ” Gottlieb snapped vehemently. “I am  _concerned_ for you!”

Newt sank into the chair a bit, humbled.

“Sorry. I’m sorry. Thank you,” he said, as earnestly as he could. “I’ll pop some aspirin and go to bed, okay?”

“Good enough,” Gottlieb muttered, taking the dishtowel away and wetting a clean corner so Newt could wash off his face. “And if there’s no improvement tomorrow I trust you’ll go to the medical bay?”

“Yeah, yeah…”

 

* * *

 

 

The hours ticked by and sleep didn’t come. Newt tossed and turned in his bed, feeling the beating of his pulse behind his left eye. He stared at the clock for a while, watching nine o’clock ooze slowly into ten, and then eleven. He pressed his pillow against his face and considered smothering himself into unconsciousness.

Outside his window he could hear the soft rush of surf lapping against the Shatterdome’s seawalls. The sound was a soft, soothing rhythm, hypnotic in its pattern. Newt closed his eyes and focused on the waves, trying to time his breathing with the roar and crash of breakers.

His head sank a little deeper against the mattress and he felt himself finally relax.  His limbs felt heavy, his breath slowing to a crawl. Coldness crept over him in an icy wave. Darkness, the darkness had come again, and in it and of it was the silence. He hated the silence, hated it so much. He felt bereft, incomplete. Nothing steered him as he was meant to be steered. He did not destroy, did not attack – there was nothing in the dark but himself and his loneliness.

There was pain in him, too. An insistent biting in his head that he could not ease, jabs of emotions that were not his. Fear, anxiety, confusion. It made him want to dive deeper into the dark and seek escape, but even he could not withstand the stronger pressures below.

A thousand miles below and above, Newt sat up blearily and stumbled to the bathroom, caught in a fever dream. Heat painted a painful streak across cold clammy skin, and he looked into the bathroom mirror in confusion.

He saw his face, bloody-nosed and pale, but it didn't feel like it was his. Other, monstrous faces ghosted over the pale human one, afterimages that stared at him through the glass. He put a hand to the faces-that-weren’t and dozens of hands followed suit, claws and fingers dragging down his cheek. The blood was scarlet and electric blue, colors juxtaposed one over the other. He leaned against the sink and stared at himself.

_What’s wrong with me?_

The thought was clear, and it was his and not his.

_pain pain cold dark alone cold_

 

_alone_

_afraid_

 

The thought wasn’t a word, but a feeling. Newt clung to it as though it was a life preserver and felt himself drawn up and out of the dream, fully awake. The ghosting images of faces and hands –  _kaiju_ faces,  _kaiju_ hands – faded. He stared wide-eyed at himself and shook his head hard, splashing cold water on his sweaty face.

He went back to his room and sat on the edge of the bed, shivering with fear he wasn’t sure was really his. He didn’t go back to sleep.

 


	4. Chapter 4

4.

 

Gottlieb woke the next morning with a vague sense of unease and empty quarters. Newt’s door yawned open to reveal an unmade bed and a pillowcase smeared with drops of dried blood. The sight of it made the unease prickle icily at the back of his mind, and he limped into main room expecting to find Newt dead on the floor. Instead he spotted a note written in Newt’s barely legible scrawl on the table; Gottlieb squinted at it, despairing of the man’s handwriting.

 

             _H-_

_Bad night, keeping promise. At med. Don’t clean my side of the lab, I know when you move things._

_N._

            Gottlieb sat down at the table, reading and rereading the note. His unease grew with insidious slowness into something he couldn’t quite put his finger on; dread, maybe. Newton was erratic and impulsive, but he knew how to take care of himself and stop before things got out of control. Most of the time _._

            Well.  _Occasionally._

            Abandoning the note, Gottlieb braced himself up on the table and stood, groping for his cane. His morning routine felt off without Newt there to make a fuss with his constant obnoxious chatter, and breakfast was an uncomfortable five minute affair in silence. Everything had a sense of some indefinable  _wrongness_  to it, and Gottlieb couldn’t figure out what it was. This wasn’t one colleague missing the presence of another. This felt different.

            He’d heard the Jaeger pilots talk, of course. Once a Drift bond was established, things changed between people. Relationships grew stronger, more understanding. Becoming a new mind to steer a new body like a Jaeger took absolute trust. Aleksis and Sasha Kaidonovsky had been the benchmark for Drift compatibility – a bond so stable and strong they were like one being in and out of their Jaeger, one seeming to know the other’s thoughts and emotions without ever having to say a word.

            Gottlieb wasn’t much for the metaphysical, but everything he knew about the Drift challenged his understanding. Drift bonds changed things at a level so profound it was almost impossible to explain. Finding a compatible partner was like finding a separate half one didn’t know was missing – a symbiosis, providing balance.

            But such balance had never been something Gottlieb had noticed he was missing, in normal life or otherwise. He had conditioned himself to accepting a life devoted wholly to academia, alone. Relationships with people puzzled and frustrated him. He had loved his parents through a sense of familial duty, but caring for them on a deeper level was difficult. Family was white noise around him, ghosting in and out of his life. His father in particular had been a noise he was desperate to tune out, especially after Lars Gottlieb had broken away from the Corps and begun championing the Walls of Life. If that was the kind of legacy his family was interested in, Gottlieb was glad for the self-imposed distancing.

            After _his_ recruitment into the Corps, though. That was when he truly felt like he’d come into his prime. He had been thrown immediately into a terrible, fascinating fray. The first few months had been the best of his life, facing problem after insurmountable problem, told simply ‘ _find a way to make this work’_. Unlimited resources he’d never dreamed of having access to were at his beck and call: equipment, people…it was the stuff of heaven.

            And then Newt had shown up.

            Gottlieb found himself grinning at the memory. Obnoxious, noisy, getting into everything like a nosy cat. Untidy, unkempt, and those  _ridiculous_  tattoos. Gottlieb had been scandalized at the utter lack of decorum, bringing in complaints weekly to the head of his department, and anyone else who would stop and listen long enough. For  _ten years_  they had dealt with each other. It was almost beyond belief that they hadn’t managed to kill each other. He wondered idly when loathing had turned to grudging respect to quiet, unspoken fondness. The Drift had enabled a clearer line of communication for it, certainly. But it had been a foundation long since laid before that day.

            Pushing away from the table, Gottlieb did the washing up and wondered how Newt was faring. The sense of wrongness pervaded, and a new, subtle ache pulsed behind his right eye.

 

 

* * *

 

 

            Nursing a headache that felt like someone was trying to slowly dig his left eye out with a spoon, Newt was halfway to the medical bay when the sharp clack of sticks caught his attention. The Kwoon Combat Room was a little off the beaten path, but despite how shitty he felt, his curiosity had already gotten the best of him. A small gathering of recruits was training in the Kwoon and being observed silently by Raleigh Becket. Newt hadn’t really spoken to him outside their first meeting – God, he _still_ cringed at how awkward he’d been – but they did nod cordially to each other when they passed in the halls. Newt watched recruits as they went through a set of basic forms, flowing from one to the next. The clacking sticks were from a sparring pair in one corner, and it was them that piqued Newt’s interest.

            Both recruits had strength and enthusiasm but Newt could tell they lacked focus. The sticks clashed against each other again and again, and Newt flinched at the noise of each impact. The shorter of the pair was the one that should be winning. His partner's left side was so wide open even Newt could’ve gotten a good kidney punch in, but the kid was determined to break in through the front.

            Newt watched them keenly. He could trace the steps in his mind like a dance, how he would do it. The stick would probably catch him across the shoulders, but he’d twist just  _so,_ dodging the kick from the tall recruit’s leg, chop behind the knee of his weight-bearing leg, catch him in a headlock as he fell and push, rewarded with a good sharp  _break-_

           He jolted out of his daydream, falling back a step. He could almost feel the crunch of bone beneath his hand and he shook his head to dispel the thought. Behind his left eye, the pain pulsed nauseatingly. He glanced around the room and was glad no one seemed to notice him – until he locked eyes with Raleigh. He flushed, waving weakly. Raleigh frowned and waved back, mouthing  _wait?_ Unable to think of a good reason to say no, Newt nodded. The training period ended soon after and the recruits filed past Newt. He didn’t look the tall kid in the eye, stepping around him as though afraid to touch him. The empty room seemed too big, and he hugged his arms around himself almost protectively.

            “Hey,” he said to Raleigh. “Sorry to just kinda spy on you. I’m never in this part of the Shatterdome. Thought I’d see what the noise was about.”

            “Don’t worry about it, you weren’t bothering anyone.” Raleigh collected the discarded sticks and bundled them up, stowing them in a back corner. He looked at Newt speculatively. “Are you-?”

            “Fine,” Newt said, interrupting. “Headcold or something.”

            Raleigh nodded but it was obvious he didn’t quite believe him. Newt coughed uncomfortably, jabbing a thumb towards the door.

            “Well. I was…yeah, I was heading to medical. I’ll…see you? Yeah. See you.”

            He turned to go but Raleigh caught him by the shoulder, making him flinch. Replacing the initial awkwardness was something else and Newt twisted away from Raleigh’s touch. He tried to speak but nothing but a sick sounding croak came out, and he found himself soaked in sweat.

            It was _fear_ he felt. Jesus, he was scared shitless. Raleigh was terrifying him and he couldn’t understand  _why_ -

_coldwaterdark night destroy hunt find metalmetalmetalpain pain pain rage_

“Alaska,” Newt blurted. Raleigh stared at him, baffled.

            “Doctor Geiszler?”

            “Alaska,” Newt repeated, pointing at Raleigh shakily. “Knifehead. That’s… _that’s_  why.”

            Panic was constricting his throat and drying his mouth. His heart pounded in his chest and

             _waves drowning waves destroy it destroy it   destroy  them  rend  it open  kill it_

           

_metal   crunching metal rip it open one gone other remains rage pain blood pain   firefirefire burning_

_destroyed flesh   dying   again   again   again     failed_

_j aeg e r_

Newt made an awful sound, turning and fleeing the room as fast as he could. Raleigh shouted something behind him but the words were meaningless, drowned out by the crash of metal against armored flesh, the screaming of a dying monster – the Jaeger or the kaiju? Did Jaegers scream? The metal shrieked and groaned when it was twisted off, cables snapping and unraveling just like the bridge as Trespasser plowed through it into San Francisco Bay destroying everything that was its directive it understood the directive because that was all it had

_no choice_

_no choice_

No choice but the directive he understood he knew now he would follow it if he could but this body was weak and could do nothing

 

 

weak teeth weak flesh and the cold the  _crushing darkness and the cold_

 

Newt staggered, his legs giving out from under him, and fell unconscious. Raleigh found him a minute later rigid in seizure, blood streaking from his nose and falling drip by slow drip on to the floor.


	5. Chapter 5

5.

 

  _water darkness cold fear pain afraid god this hurts what is_

_alonealonealone silence dark silence no you need to listen to me let go let go_

_stop it silencecold shut up and listen coldpressuresilence_

_stop it!coldfearhurt_

_hurthurthurt dammit please you’re pressuresilence_   _hurting me too   let GO_

Newt woke with a strangled gasp, sitting bolt upright. A nurse was at his side at once pushing him back down. He swatted her hand off his shoulder and tried to get out of bed.

            “Doctor Geiszler, you need to calm down-“

            “I’m perfectly calm, get the hell off me!”

            “Doctor Geiszler!”

            Raleigh had been waiting outside, peeking in at the sudden noise. He realized he was halfway across the room before he caught himself, wincing and holding his hands up in apology. Newt stared at him confusedly.

            “Why am I…” he said, looking around the room. Everything was fuzzy without his glasses, and he squinted at the IV bag tethered to his arm. He’d flailed around so much that blood was oozing up the line, faint red ribbons twisting in the saline. He watched it with intense interest, mouth hanging open slightly.

            “Doctor Geiszler?” Raleigh asked, uncertain. “You okay?”

            “We have him on an anticonvulsant,” the nurse said. “They can throw you for a loop.”

            “Anti-what?” Newt asked, looking up. “Convul…what?”

            “You had a seizure,” Raleigh said carefully, sitting down beside the bed. “Do you remember coming into the Kwoon?”

            “That’s a word I could literally say  _all day_  and not get sick of,” Newt said, grinning. “Kwoon. It really just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?  _Kwoon._  They should name a  _Jaeger_  that.”

            Raleigh bit very hard at his lip to keep from smiling, quickly nodding his agreement. Newt looked up at the nurse and she gave him a gentle pat on the shoulder.

            “I’ll be outside if you need me.”

            Newt watched the nurse leave and then turned his attention back to the IV. Its needle hurt deep in his arm, the discomfort encouraging him to try and take it out. He picked clumsily at the medical tape but Raleigh caught his hand, guiding it carefully into his lap.

            “Oh, hi Raleigh,” Newt said. “I’m being really rude, I should get you coffee or something.”

            “No, no, we’re good,” Raleigh said quickly, pushing him down by the shoulder as he tried to get up again. “But I do need to talk with you. Okay?”

            “Sure, sure. Definitely.  _Anything._ ”

            Raleigh ducked his head down briefly so he could school his face to calm. No matter how drugged up Newt was it wouldn’t be polite to laugh at him. He looked up again and Newt was waiting expectantly, eyes glassy and little too wide.

            “We talked for a minute in the Kwoon Combat Room,” Raleigh said. “And then something happened. You mentioned Alaska. My last mission before Hong Kong.”

            Newt felt fear stir beneath the heavy warm blanket of medications, and he looked away. A faint throb of pain pulsed behind his left eye.

            “Alaska,” he echoed. “Anchorage. Knifehead, category three…”

            “Something made you panic. And when I found you, you were seizing up. Can you tell me what happened?”

            The fear spread cold tendrils through Newt’s mind and his mouth had gone dry. He closed his eyes, shaking his head.

            “I can’t talk about it, it makes it real,” he said hoarsely. “It was a dream, they’re dreams. It’s a headache. It’s…I’m  _cold._ ”

            “I’ve seen seizures like that before,” Raleigh said. “Only a couple times. People synching up incorrectly. Bad Drift partners.”

            “Had to do it,” Newt said, eyes flickering open to stare at the ceiling. A hand pulled unconsciously at the left side of his face, coming dangerously close to scratching at his eye. Raleigh grabbed his hand before he could hurt himself.

            “What did you do, Doctor Geiszler?”

            “Kaiju don’t think like we do,” Newt said, voice fading to a thread. “Images, impressions. Memories, hivemind memories, one is everyone.”

            He rocked back against the bed and started to hyperventilate.

            “They’re all the same one. Doesn’t matter if they’re different, they’re the  _same,_ ” he rambled. The heart monitor beeped alarmingly fast, and Raleigh looked over his shoulder for the nurse. Newt suddenly grabbed him by the collar and shook him hard.

            “There’s still one left,” he hissed. “Slattern, Leatherback, Onibaba, every single one is the same one!  _They’re all alive!_ ”

            Pain exploded behind his left eye and Newt cried out, pressing his hands against it to stifle it. He wouldn’t let it in again. He wouldn’t. He would  _not let it coldpainpressure pain_

_cold cold   cold            pain_

_nononononono shutupshutupshutup_

_fearfear pain alone silence cold_

_NONONONONO SHUT UP SHUT UP get away get away you don’t you won’t LET GO GET AWAY FROM ME GET_

_“GET AWAY FROM ME!”_

Raleigh bolted out of his chair shouting for help, and the room suddenly swarmed with doctors and nurses. A sharp little pain pricked at Newt and chemical warmth replaced the cold, and he slipped under it with relief.

 


	6. Chapter 6

6.

 

 “He’s delusional.”

            Raleigh bit his tongue on the sharp reflexive protest, looking to Mako for support. She shook her head and watched the Marshall as he turned away from them. Herc Hansen always looked tired, but over the past few weeks he had seemed to physically age. His back seemed bent under the responsibilities he carried now, and there were deep lines around his eyes that hadn’t been there before. They had met in his office; the space had been thrown together for him to store the mountains of paperwork he had inherited from Pentecost alongside the Marshall title, and lately it seemed he was living in it twenty-four hours a day.

            “Sir, _please_ ,” Raleigh began. Herc held up a silencing hand.

            “He did something incredibly stupid when he Drifted with that thing and now he’s reaping the reward,” he said. “I don’t mean to sound cruel. Newton’s a good man, however irritating he can be. But he is  _delusional.”_

            Raleigh gave a frustrated sound, running his hands roughly through his hair. Newt was still laid up in the medical bay drugged into unconsciousness; scans of his brain had revealed activity like a bad Drift; he was caught in it, trapped no matter what they tried. Whatever was on the other side – real or not - it was refusing to let him go.

            “Marshall,” Mako said. “It’s not impossible that there may be something left behind after the triple event. Pieces of kaiju can remain alive in certain conditions even after they’ve been torn apart. Doctor Geiszler had a living brain in container no better than a  _fish tank_.”

            “I know that. But I also need you both to see this from my point of view,” Herc said, leaning against his desk. “What  _I_  see is a man who has always walked a very fine line between being brilliant and being crazier than a shithouse rat. He  _hooked up his brain_  to something that he knew full well could kill him, if not permanently injure him. And you’re asking me now to go on faith that what he’s saying is true? Does he know where this supposed kaiju is?”

            “No, sir,” Raleigh admitted. “But if we could let him wake up for a second, maybe try and question him-“

            “No. No, you see? I can’t do this, Raleigh. The shock of what he’s done to himself is catching up to him. He’s scrambled his brains and I cannot afford to waste resources on the ravings of a  _lunatic_.”

            “We would not have been able to close the Breach without Doctor Geiszler’s help,” Mako said sharply. “He and Doctor Gottlieb-“

            “Doctor Gottlieb can speak for himself, Miss Mori.”

            Gottlieb’s cane rapped sharply on the cement floor as he swept inside, unable to lurk outside the door any longer. He leveled a piercing stare on Herc, expression masklike.

            “You two, dismissed,” Herc said. Raleigh and Mako glanced at each other – Gottlieb could almost feel the Drift bond between them in that shared look – and they left the room without protest. Herc folded his arms over his chest, an unspoken challenge in his posture.

            “You don’t believe what Newton is experiencing to be real,” Gottlieb said.

            “No, I don’t. I’ve known him as long as you, Doctor. I know what he can be like when he fixates. Quite frankly I’m surprised you’re taking his side in this. It’s not like you to agree with him on anything.”

            “This is a situation that hits closer to home than I am comfortable with,” Gottlieb said stiffly. “Newton is…my colleague.”

            “He’s your  _friend,_ ” Herc said. “And you’re scared for him. I understand that, Hermann. I do. But I can’t go on a wing and a prayer that there’s something to find just because it’s Newt saying so. Even if there was a kaiju, what are we going to do? There are no Jaegers left to fight it with. I’d need time to gather artillery, nukes, personnel.”

            “So do it,” Gottlieb said. “We cannot afford another K-Day, sir. It has been mere weeks since we closed the Breach and shut down the clock. Would you see such a victory sullied by an attack?”

            “My hands are tied, Hermann,” Herc growled, frustrated. “I have enough funding right now to buy supplies and set up token forces with planes and choppers. Everything else I’ve got is funneled to restart the Jaeger program. For God’s sake, we’re dredging the bay to salvage  _scrap_  off Cherno and Typhoon!”

            Gottlieb flinched but didn’t back down, glaring at the Marshall.

            “I can appreciate the difficulties we are facing, but-“

            “No, I don’t think you can!” Herc retorted, his voice raising. “You want to believe he’s telling the truth because it means he hasn’t  _broken himself!_  There has been no energy signature like the Breach detected since we closed it, and there has been  _no movement.”_

He took a breath to steady himself, though the color had risen in his face. He was too often on a short fuse these days.

            “He’s snapped, Hermann. The sooner you accept that, the sooner we can get back to what needs to be done.”

            “You would cast him aside like he was nothing?” Gottlieb hissed, appalled. “You would dismiss everything he’s done for the Corps now that he’s become an...an inconvenience?”

            “I would put him aside until whatever is broken in him can be mended, if that’s even possible,” Herc said flatly. “We are living in a broken  _world,_  Hermann. I can’t stop everything to tend to a single shattered person.”

            “It’s possible that-“

            “No, it is  _not!_  There is nothing there!”

            “Why is it so hard for you to accept that there are things you cannot understand?  _Why?_  Just because you lack  _understanding_ _of_ his condition does not mean it is immediately invalidated!”

            “I will not be lectured about this,” Herc said. His voice rang with banked anger. “I have dealt with enough of your crackpot science to last a lifetime-“

            “ _You would have damned us all if not for his actions!”_

            Herc took a step back as Gottlieb limped at him, thrusting an accusing finger in his face. He looked apoplectic.

            “Do not think for one  _moment_  that I have forgotten how you brushed us aside during the Breach assault,” he growled. “You would have allowed the mission to fail because you have no concept of what impossibility truly is, and how far logic can be stretched. You see only the here-and-now and what can be beaten and crushed beneath the heel of your boot.”

            “I have seen impossibility, Doctor,” Herc said, swatting Hermann’s hand away from his face and scowling deeply. “You have no idea of what I’ve seen and what I know.”

            “You have not seen it as  _I_  have,” Gottlieb retorted. “You truly have no idea at all.”

            “Is that a fact? So why aren’t you strapped to a bed and sedated like he is?”

            “Adaptability.”

            Gottlieb stepped back, leaning heavily on his cane and trying to collect himself. Herc watched him hawkishly, arms crossed over his chest again.

            “Fine, I’ll bite. What do you mean?”

            “After every attack and consequent defeat, the next kaiju was an update from the previous design,” Gottlieb said. “Adaptations to environment, fighting style, weaponry. I theorize it also applies to neurological conditions. Newton plugged into a kaiju brain to tap into the hivemind, and the hivemind reacted. It bonded with him.  _Solely_  with him. I was there the second time to help bear the weight, but it did not recognize me as part of that bond. If we were to attempt another three-way Drift, I have no doubt it would have adapted to latch onto my mind as it has his.”

            “You  _theorize_ ,” Herc said, mouth twisting. Gottlieb regarded him with narrowed eyes, anger loosening his tongue.

            “Yes. Just as I theorize that the workload you are under after assuming the mantle of Marshall has left very little time for you to mourn your son. I am not the only one who is bogged down by emotional attachments, sir.”

            Herc’s face paled. “I suggest you choose your next words carefully,” he said in a low voice, approaching Gottlieb like a stalking animal. “Because I am very,  _very_  close to knocking that cane out from under you and getting on with my day.”

            Gottlieb drew himself up, steeling his shoulders as he regarded the Marshall. “I believe Newton is right,” he said. “And so do you, deep down. Do not allow such petty things as  _money_  to govern your decisions. It could kill us all if you choose incorrectly.”

            “And what do you suggest I do?”

            “Exploit the bond,” Gottlieb said, an edge of discomfort at the idea in his tone. “Wake him up.”

            “I’ll think on it,” Herc said. Gottlieb started to protest and the Marshall held up a silencing hand.  _“I will think on it._  Do not push me anymore today, Doctor Gottlieb. Dismissed.”

            Gottlieb gathered himself to argue, but suddenly relented. He bobbed his head in a nod and turned on his heel, limping out of the office. Herc watched him go, waiting until the door had swung shut before he sat heavily on his desk, pressing his hands to his face in bone-deep exhaustion.


	7. Chapter 7

7.

 

            Newt was eased off his sedatives the next day and was fully awake by nightfall. Regaining consciousness had not been a smooth transition. Gottlieb arrived with two Shatterdome guards in tow, finding a knot of doctors muttering in hushed tones in front of the door, and they all looked at him with unease.

            “I’m here to see Doctor Geiszler. Marshall Hansen has given me permission.”

            “I don’t think you want to do that, sir,” one of the doctors said. Gottlieb noticed a thick bandage on his hand. “The patient is…”

            “I am here to see Doctor Geiszler,” Gottlieb repeated icily, nodding towards the door. “If you would all please  _excuse me._ ”

            The group cleared away from the door and Gottlieb pushed it open with his cane, peering inside. The guards tried to follow him, but backed away as he turned to glare at them.

“If I have need of your services, gentlemen, I will call you in,” he said.

“Marshall Hansen made it very clear we’re to-”

“Protect me, yes,” Gottlieb said impatiently. “And if I need protecting, I’ll give a shout.”

The guards glanced at each other, and with reluctance stationed themselves on either side of the door. Gottlieb nodded in satisfaction and eased inside, letting the door swing shut behind him. It locked from the outside with a disturbingly final  _click,_ and for a shameful moment Gottlieb felt trapped and afraid. He looked to the hospital bed and the fear dissipated at once.

            Newt was awake, looking quite ill and and eating pudding with a deeply depressed expression as he stared out the window. He glanced over at the door, then did a double-take and grinned widely.

            “Hey!”

            A small part of the anxiety that had weighed heavily in Gottlieb’s chest eased, and he smiled back. He nodded towards the dinner tray Newt was ignoring.

            “Only eating dessert?”

            “I like tapioca, sue me.”

            Easing himself down into the chair by Newt’s bedside, Gottlieb stretched his bad leg with a sigh of relief; he had been pacing most of the day and the exertion was catching up to him. Newt finished his dessert but kept the spoon in his mouth, chewing on the flimsy plastic. He was clearly glad for the company but didn’t seem nearly as keen to talk. Gottlieb, hardly the best at starting conversations, took up the challenge anyway.

            “So,” he said. “How are things?”

            “Oh, y’know,” Newt said evasively, looking out the window again. “Hanging out.”

            “Any trouble with your physicians?”

            “No, no. They’ve uh…been good. Really good.”

            “No issues upon waking?”

            Newt shifted, giving Gottlieb a sidelong look.

            “I might’ve…I might’ve bit a guy.”

            There was a brief pause, and Gottlieb cleared his throat.

            “I see,” he said. “Any particular reason why?”

            There was a sharp cracking sound as Newt bit on the spoon again, and he spit out shards of plastic onto his blanket. “I don’t  _know_ ,” he said plaintively, refusing to look at Gottlieb. “It just…it seemed like it was a really good idea at the time. Then I woke up a bit more and suddenly there’s a guy shouting ‘ _why the hell did he bite me?_ ’ and…turns out it was a bad decision.”

            Gottlieb moved as though to touch his shoulder, and Newt jerked away from him, shaking his head quickly.

            “Don’t.”

            “I have put up with your uncivilized behavior for ten years,” Gottlieb said sharply. Newt stared at him, jarred out of his misery. “If you decide to start biting like an undisciplined five-year-old, it will just be yet another character flaw for me to deal with.”

            “I  _do not_  have character flaws.”

            “Only a narcissist would think that! You are a walking  _encyclopedia_  of dysfunctional behavior.”

            “Says the guy who labels what toothbrush to use at what time of day! You only need  _one toothbrush!_ Who the hell has toothbrushes for morning and evening besides you? _”_

“At least I remember to brush my teeth,” Gottlieb said succinctly. “You are a constant uncouth, untidy mess. You’re lucky I’m around to remind you to comb your hair.”

            “Oh, well,  _thank_ you, Hermann.  _Really_ ,” Newt said, with such intense annoyance Gottlieb smiled. “ _What?_  “

            “Nothing. I’ve just missed our conversations,” he said. Newt smiled a little, shaking his head in amusement. He even laughed, though the sound was strained.

            “You manipulative jerk.”

            “Now’s not the time to throw names around,” Gottlieb said, pulling his reading glasses from his pocket and grabbing a magazine from the shelf by Newt’s bed. “Good Lord, is this from 2018?”

            Newt watched him, trying to ignore the ever-present ache behind his left eye. It had grown more noticeable the more lucid he became, and now that the sedatives had worn off completely it was a steady drumbeat of pain, pulsing in time to his heart. It scared him now that he had a better idea of what it really was.

            “What are you doing here, Hermann?”

            “Reading about the extramarital exploits of the rich and famous. The alimony rates in the nineties were exorbitant.”

            Newt swatted at the magazine, and Gottlieb glanced at him. “What are you doing here?” he repeated, voice quieter. Gottlieb sighed.

            “You know better than to ask me why. You know how I hate redundancy.”

            “There’s something  _wrong_  with me, Hermann.”

            “I tell you that daily.”

            “ _This isn’t a joke!”_

The pain beat vividly behind his eye, and Newt struggled to calm himself down, taking a few deep breaths. Gottlieb watched him, his expression unreadable, and then put his hand on Newt’s shoulder. This time, Newt didn’t shrink away.

            “I am  _fully_  aware of what this is,” he said tersely. “And I wouldn’t be any kind of friend to you if I left you to endure it alone.”

            For once in his life, Newt didn’t have a quick or sarcastic answer. He nodded vaguely, rubbing at his left eye and settling back against his pillows, turning to look out the window. Gottlieb returned to his magazine, flipping the pages unconcernedly.

            An hour passed by before Newt started to feel drowsy. Watching the ocean got boring after awhile, the play of light on waves no longer distracting. Under the sound of his heart monitor and the occasional crinkling turn of a page, Newt could hear the roar and crash of breakers. He closed his eyes and listened to the sound of it. The pain behind his left eye twisted like a knife but he was indifferent to it, breath going shallow and feeling as though immeasurable pressure was crushing him down against his bed. The pain was always there. He had learned to live with it.

                                    _coldcoldcoldcoldcold_

_silencealone alone       alonealonealonealone    pain fear      alonealonealone_

Somewhere far away, a heart monitor chirped out an alarming, erratic rhythm.

             _painpainpain pressure cold not again god is this ever going to stop alone no  you’re not  paincold           alone_

_silencealonepain listen to me you son of a bitch_

_pressurepressure pain cold_

_No silencesilence pain             cold_

_Not alone coldpressuresilence enough silencesilence pain enoughenoughenough!_

_silence    ?_

_no.         you know I’m here._

Newt went rigid, breath hissing out through clenched teeth. Blood trickled down from his nose in a weak flow and splattered onto the collar of his hospital gown. His head felt like it was going to burst from the pain and there was a crushing grip on his wrist.

            “Don’t let it control you,” Gottlieb hissed in his ear, holding on even as Newt tried to wrench away. “Where is it?”

             _coldcoldcold pain angerconfusion fear where where where where_

“Find it. I can help make this stop if you find it.”

             _pressurepressure pain cold_

_light_

“Light,” Newt choked. “ _Light._ ”

            “Don’t be cryptic about it, you damned fool!  _Where is it?”_

 

             _lightlightlightlight city destroy hunt directive directivedirective directive? silencesilencesilence_

_no_

_directive_

_i           am_

_alone_

Newt gave a strangled cry and ripped away from Gottlieb, clutching his head. Something strong, horribly strong, pulled at him as though trying to drag him down into the crushing dark. It didn’t want to be alone. How could it bear being alone, after being connected to so many others? Why couldn’t it make him  _understand?_

           

             _I’m not like you_

_you’re hurting me!_

There was a second of silence that stretched into an eternity, and Newt felt the voice in his mind turn to a crushing grip of jaws.

 

_i       will_

_make               you_

_**like** _

_**me** _

__

__

__

The words were a deafening, filling every corner until he could think of nothing else. He heard himself screaming, a door being kicked open and people shouting. Pain crashed over him in a suffocating wave and Newt passed out.

 

 


	8. Chapter 8

8.

 

             _“Welcome to Radio Free Jaeger, your all-in-one station for music and emergency broadcast needs. Things are looking all quiet on the western front…and the eastern, the southern, the northern. Two and a half weeks have passed and not a peep from those big baddies from under the sea, dear listeners. Come up out of your bunkers for a breath of fresh air and fear not about the Kaiju Blue – the Pan Pacific Defense Corp has our backs manning up the post-apocalyptic cleanup crews. And now, some music.”_

 

“Radio Free Jaeger. Jesus, where do they _find_ these guys,” Tendo said, though he turned up the volume. “ _Moanin’ For You_ ” crooned out of the speakers with only a slight edge of static marring the words, and Max yawned under the control console. “Aw, c’mon. Don’t be a critic, this stuff is classic.”

            The bulldog snorted and went back to sleep, and Tendo was left alone with the radio in an otherwise empty LOCCENT. He didn’t mind the night shift, really. Monitoring sea and air traffic, directing people on the floor – nothing too strenuous. He had used to direct the Jaeger bay’s activity too, and that was a duty he had really begun to miss.

Now he directed the salvage ships that were picking Crimson Typhoon and Cherno Alpha’s bones, and the sight of the once-great machines coming back in boxes and crates broke his heart. He missed seeing the Jaegers out on the floor as though standing at attention. He missed the pilot teams too. The Kaidonovskys, the Wei Tangs. Hell, even Chuck Hansen had grown on him a little - like an obnoxious, egotistical fungus.

            “But everybody’s gone now, huh boy?” Tendo muttered to the dog. “Even Stacker.”

            “And now you’re stuck with me.”

            “Evenin’, Marshall,” Tendo said, looking up at Herc. “Trouble sleeping?”

            “Slept two days ago, that’ll hold me over,” Herc said, leaning against Tendo’s chair. He watched the collection of screens as though trying to find hidden messages, eyes flicking from one to the next. “Any unusual movement from the Breach site?”

            “Not a thing, sir.”

            “So much for theories,” Herc sighed.

            “Sir?”

            “Nothing,” Herc said, shaking his head. “Just…trying to tie up loose ends.”

            Tendo glanced up at him again, but bit his tongue against questions at the weary look on Herc’s face.

            “How’s the salvaging effort going?”

            “Crimson Typhoon’s been mostly broken down and brought in,” Tendo said. “Conn-Pod and the tertiary arm are both total losses, though.”

            “And Cherno Alpha?”

            “Most of her is too irradiated to even approach safely.” Tendo sighed, rubbing at his eyes tiredly. “We’ve got the majority of the wreck isolated so it doesn’t contaminate anything further, but we’re going to need some serious cleanup crews onsite soon.”

            “Everyone’s busy sweeping up what’s left of Hong Kong inland, it’ll be weeks before we can get anyone seaboard.”

            “Well, we  _did_  kinda save the world. There’s got to be someone we can lean on to get some help.”

            “We also left a shipping tanker wedged between two skyscrapers. That tends to annoy city officials.”

            Tendo laughed, though it tapered off when he realized Herc hadn’t been making a joke. He cleared his throat awkwardly and reached down under the console to scratch Max’s ears.

            “Could always make it a memorial landmark,” he said, trying to lighten the uncomfortable silence. “They make a big deal about where Hundun fell in Milan.”

            “And where Karloff died, and Onibaba,” Herc said. “And Mutavore, now. There’s…a  _mountain_  of flowers where it died. Pictures, cards, signs. You’d think people would be tired of building memorials by now.”

            Tendo glanced up at Herc again. “How much of it is for Chuck?”

            Herc tensed, but then a rueful smile eased across his face. “All of it.”

            “I’m…sorry about him, Marshall.”

            “So am I.”

            Max whined in his sleep, and Herc glanced under the console. Tendo held his hands up defensively.

            “He was there when I got here.”

            “He pisses like a racehorse and eats cables. You’ll be sorry if he starts making himself at home.”

            “I’ve had worse roommates,” Tendo said wryly. At a far end of the console, a sudden soft ping caught his ear.

            “What’s that?”

            “Radar scanner I tapped into.” Tendo frowned. “Deep sea sensor.”

            He rolled his chair over to the radar screen, expanding the holographic display. Herc had gone very quiet behind him, but Tendo didn’t notice, busily flipping from readout to readout. The ping came again, more insistently.

“What…?” A small yellow dot indicating an unknown object was flashing on the readout. The ping came again and again, picking up speed. Tendo stared at it. “That’s…no.  _No.”_

_“_ What is it?”  Herc asked. His voice was strained. Tendo expanded the live feed, watching the dot as it sped across the map.

“Unidentified bogey clocking in at sixty miles per hour and climbing,” Tendo said. “No heat signatures to ID it as submersible, sir.”

“Any radio or radar emitting?”

“No, sir.”

Herc stared at the screen, jaw working. “Where’s it headed?”

“Path has already self-adjusted two times,” Tendo said, turning from the screen to the Marshall. “Sir, it’s coming at  _us.”_

 

 

 


	9. Chapter 9

9.

 

Newt woke up to someone trying to remove his glasses. The logical reaction was to immediately swipe the offending hand away from his face and turn away. Growling like an angry animal wasn’t.

“I swear to God if he bites me again-“

Conscious thought returned in an ugly crash and Newt groaned, forcing his eyes open in a painful squint. The doctor had stepped back across the room holding a small penlight like a baton, and there was a loud argument outside the door.

“-let me back inside that room  _this instant!_  This is a vital-”

“Doctor, he almost broke your wrist. Marshall Hansen was clear we need to keep him under sedation if he becomes erratic or violent.”

“I did…I did what?” Newt asked weakly, staring down at his hands. He only remembered Gottlieb holding onto him as though trying to anchor him during the… _whatever_  had happened. Seizure? Mental break? The doctor – and an armed guard Newt hadn’t noticed at first – both stared at him. “Hey… _hey._ What happened? What’d I do?”

The doctor scowled at him as he tucked the penlight away into his coat pocket, and the guard looked away uncomfortably.

“ _Let me back in this room immediately!”_

Newt jolted as the door swung open, and Gottlieb pushed inside. Another guard had him by the shoulder and was trying to forcibly pull him back out no matter how hard the man thrashed against him. In a moment of desperation or pure spite, the guard kicked his cane out of his hand and caught him roughly as Gottlieb suddenly pitched forward, his leg giving out from under him.

“ _HEY!”_

Newt had rolled off the bed before he even realized he was moving, ignoring the dizzying wave of pain that made him stumble. Rage and pain turned his vision blurry and hazed in red, and he bared his teeth in threat. The doctor took one look at him and immediately ducked behind his own guard.

The second guard dragged Gottlieb outside and dumped him on the floor, kicking his cane towards him. As the door swung shut, he drew his pistol and leveled it at Newt. The rage that had blinded him left as suddenly as it came, and Newt stared at it. He laughed suddenly in disbelief.

“What are you gonna do, shoot me?” he said, gesturing at it. “You’re really gonna  _shoot_  me?”

“If I have to, sir,” the guard said. “Get back in your bed.”

Newt looked over to the first guard and his doctor. The genuine fear on the doctor’s face he could understand - nobody liked getting bitten by apparent psychopaths - but it was the guards fear he couldn't wrap his head around. Newton Geiszler, who had been stuffed into lockers until senior year, was scaring them. The most violent thing he’d ever done in his life was get into a fistfight in high school, and that had ended with him getting a broken nose and two cracked ribs.  

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said to them, holding his hands up as the disbelief faded. “I’m…I’m not. I wouldn’t.”

“Get back into bed, sir,” the guard said again, taking a small step towards him. “Now.”

“You kicked his cane,” Newt said, staring down the pistol’s barrel. “I got angry, I’m  _sorry.”_

“Back in the bed. Doctor?”

Pushing past the guard he’d been using as a human shield, the doctor took a syringe from a tray on the countertop. He uncapped it and tapped the air out, and Newt looked at it in sudden panic.

“No. No, you…you can’t put me out again.”

“Marshall’s orders.”

“You don’t understand! It gets more and more pissed off every time it can’t find me. It doesn’t want to be alone. It wasn't  _made_  to be alone. I keep it sane.”

“Get back in the bed, sir.”

Newt shook his head frantically.

“No. I can’t let you do it again. You don’t understand how dangerous this is going to get for everyone if I’m knocked out again.”

“How do you know?” the first guard asked. Newt looked at the floor, feeling crazy even as he said the words.

“The kaiju told me. Well, it...it...showed me. They have this way of instantly communicating through a hivemind and I kind of tapped into it and…” he trailed off, looking at the syringe with more fear than the gun. “I’m not lying. Don’t  _do_  this.”

The doctor stared at him like he had two heads, and the guards exchanged looks.

“Don’t make me ask you again, sir. I’ll make you if I have to.”

“Like  _hell_  you will!”

Gottlieb’s cane smashed against the guard’s head with a satisfying  _crack_ , and he dropped his gun and fell to the floor with a yelp. Newt bolted for the door at once, ripping the IV out of his arm and tripping over the flailing guard’s legs. Gottlieb pulled him out through the open door and slammed it shut, pinning it closed with a chair.

“I am going to lodge a complaint so severe they won’t hire you on as a  _mall cop!”_  Gottlieb shouted. The second guard and the doctor pounded and shouted back, trying to force the door open. Gottlieb grabbed Newt’s arm and dragged him along, breathing heavily.

“You just bashed a guy’s head in with your cane,” Newt said, staring at him. “You just… _what?”_

“The Marshall’s decisions have begun to try my patience, so I made one of my own,” Gottlieb said jerkily, pushing him forward quickly and looking around for any medical staff that might stop them. The shouting in Newt’s room was getting louder, and the chair’s legs were squeaking against the floor as someone on the other side tried to kick it loose.

“This is a level of badass I really never expected out of you, I’m not gonna lie.” Gottlieb glared at him, then down at his hospital gown. “Hey,  _this_  at least is absolutely not my fault. I don’t know what they did with my stuff.”

“At least you’ve got your glasses,“ Gottlieb muttered, pushing him along again. Newt pushed them up his nose, puzzled. They usually took them off when he was sleeping or pitching kaiju-induced fits.

“How long was I out this time?”

“Ten minutes. Your screaming alerted my guards, and then…”

“Chaos, yeah. Hey…”

Newt stopped short, and Gottlieb bumped into him. “Move!”

“I almost broke your wrist. That’s what that guard said.”

Gottlieb rolled his eyes despairingly. “We do not have time for heartfelt apologies, Newton, we truly don’t.”

“I  _hurt_ you. Hermann, I’m sorry. I didn’t…”

The annoyance eased in Gottlieb’s expression, just a little. “I know you didn’t mean to. I doubt you even knew what you were doing. Now  _please,_ can we move before someone finds us?”

Newt nodded, wrapping his hospital gown tighter around himself and glad he at least was escaping with his underwear on. They took a back corridor that lead out of medical and into the labyrinth of the Shatterdome’s hallways, Gottlieb taking point at every turn to make sure no one spotted them.

“Look, I do appreciate being sprung from there but where are we even going to go?” Newt looked around, Gottlieb’s paranoia and the pounding pain in his head making him anxious. “We’re surrounded by people with  _guns,_  Hermann.”

“We have much bigger things to worry about than that,” Gottlieb said. “Listen.”

He pointed upwards in a vague direction, and Newt strained his ears. There was a soft echoing of thumping feet, and a loud, wailing sound that came in muffled waves.

“That’s…that’s the event alarm,” he said, staring at Gottlieb. “That only goes off if-”

            “It’s approaching the Shatterdome,” Gottlieb interrupted, pulling Newt along again. “They’re expecting it to make contact within the hour.”

            “How do you-“

            “The Marshall’s announcement. You were in the middle of a seizure at the time, I’m assuming you didn’t hear it.”

            “That is  _such_  a dick thing to joke about,” Newt snapped irritably. “I might be dying from an aneurysm, you know. This thing could be  _killing_  me.”

            It was Gottlieb that stopped short this time, and he grabbed Newt by the collar.

            “Do not say anything like that to me again,” he said sharply. Newt stared at him, nodding and raising his hands apologetically. He stumbled back a step as Gottlieb released him, and they regarded each other silently for a moment. Gottlieb shifted uncomfortably, clearing his throat and gesturing at Newt’s hospital gown.

            “We need to find you something else to wear. I’m sure there’s one of those ghastly coverall suits somewhere.”

            Ducking into a storage closet yielded a two-sizes-too-large suit and a pair of boots. Newt changed hurriedly, putting a PPDC cap he’d looted low over his face. If no one looked closely, he could pass for just another mechanic. He had finished lacing the boots up when a shudder of pain like ice ripped through him, and he was suddenly curled up on his side on the floor, gasping. Gottlieb peered in and did a startled double-take, dodging inside and trying to help him up.

            “Newton, I cannot carry you,” he hissed through gritted teeth, his bad leg buckling under Newt’s weight. “You need to get up.”

 

             _coldcoldpain cold pain no silence    not    alone  needneedneedneedneed_

“Alone,” Newt slurred, voice strained and hissing. His eyes had started to roll back into his head as the episode took hold, a trickle of blood dripping from his nose. “Cold, light, water…”

            Gottlieb propped him up against the wall and swung his hand back. It connected with Newt’s face with an alarmingly sharp crack, and Newt gave a yelp, jarred back into awareness.

            “Pull yourself together!”

            “Did you just  _backhand_ me?”

            “So now we’re even!  _Get up!”_

The muttering lingered in the back of Newt’s mind, but the sheer shock of the slap kept him focused. He pushed himself up and staggered out of the storage room, rubbing his cheek.

            “You  _backhanded me!”_

            “I’ll do it again if you don’t move!”

            “Where are we even  _going?”_

            Gottlieb pinched at the bridge of his nose, sighing as though greatly put-upon. Entirely unrelated to the murderous impulses of the kaiju bond, Newt immediately wanted to strangle him.

            “Explain the  _escape plan_  to the  _escapee_ , Hermann!”

            Gottlieb pointed unerringly forward.

            “We’re headed to find the Marshall.”

            “Oh, the guy who wanted me sedated and out of the way? This is a great plan Hermann, thank you  _so much!_ ”

            “Who the hell do you think initiated the alarm, you idiot? He needs to be told what’s happening,  _why_  it’s happening,” Gottlieb said. “We can prevent a lot of people being sent out to die without reason. Just…trust that I know what I’m doing, alright?”

            “Of course I trust you,” Newt said, staring at him. “Why the hell wouldn’t I?”

            Gottlieb looked taken aback, then smiled slightly. He nodded towards LOCCENT, and the blaring alarms still wailing over the PA.

            “Come on, then. They’re not going to save themselves.”

 


	10. Chapter 10

10.

 

            LOCCENT was packed with people by the time Gottlieb and Newt arrived. Mako and Raleigh were outside the door, looking inside and trying to see over the sea of people to catch a glimpse of screens.

            “Where is it?” Gottlieb asked. Raleigh glanced over at him and started, pointing at Newt.

            “What the hell is he doing here?”

            “Hi Raleigh, I’m doing great,” Newt snapped. “Thanks  _so much.”_

            “You’re  _bleeding_  is what you are,” Mako said, pulling a handkerchief from her back pocket and pressing it to Newt’s face. “Doctor Gottlieb, why is he here?”

            “Where _is_ it?” Gottlieb repeated sharply. Raleigh shook his head and Gottlieb growled in irritation, pushing past the crowd of people and dragging Newt alongside him. Newt made it three steps into the room before another wave of pain crippled him, and he fell to the floor on hands and knees.

            “Newton!”

            “What the hell is going on over there?”

            Newt tried to crawl forward and found himself at Herc’s feet, looking up at him. The Marshall looked stunned at first, then infuriated.

            “ _What the hell is he doing here?”_

“The situation needed his input, Marshall. I-“

            “Doctor Gottlieb, I swear to God on high I am  _this close-“_

“Sir, bogey is less than a mile out,” Tendo called. “We’ve got aerial patrols on the coastline to defend the city, but…”

            “Get _him_  out of here. Doctor Gottlieb, stay out of the way,” Herc snapped, turning away and pushing back to Tendo’s console. Rough hands grabbed at Newt and hoisted him up, and he collapsed against his newest guard. “But  _what_ , Tendo.”

            “Sir, we…this thing is huge. Scanner measures it at over four hundred feet in length. It’s massive.”

            “You  _know_  what it is,” Newt choked, spitting out flecks of blood as the flow dribbled across his lips. “Marshall, it’s  _looking for me.”_

The room went deadly quiet as everyone turned to stare at him. Gottlieb, shunted to one side and holding his cane like he was about to start swinging it, gave Herc an unreadable look. Herc approached Newt almost cautiously and took in the sight of him. Newt knew he looked like hell, but it was unsettling to have someone stare at him like he was genuinely dangerous.

            “How do you know?”

            Newt tried to stand up straighter, but pain crawled over him in waves and he could barely keep his head up.

            “Kaiju were created to be a hivemind intelligence,” he said hoarsely. “Every time this one’s reached out to me, it…it’s been trying to get away from the silence. It’s going crazy being alone. It’s hurt. Maybe it’s dying, I don’t know. But it knows I’m here and…and it’s  _coming_  for me.”

            “How do we stop it?”

            “I don’t know,” Newt said. The nosebleed was getting worse, and it spilled in fat drops onto the floor. His head was pounding as though something was trying to smash its way out of his skull and the vision in his left eye was a bloody red haze. “I don’t know how to. I don’t know what it’ll do when it finds me.”

            “We’re not  _letting_  it find you,” Herc said, turning away to Tendo once more. “Where is it?”

            “Four hundred yards and counting, sir.”

            “How many eyes have we got on the water?”

            “Two choppers, sir. They’re reporting movement but nothing cresting the water yet.”

            “No, no no no,” Newt said frantically. “Get them back here! Get them away from the water!”

            Herc ignored him, watching the scanner screens as the yellow dot drew closer to the Shatterdome icon on the map. It finally halted, blinking in position.

            “What is it waiting for?”

            Pain exploded through Newt and he cried out, clutching his head. His captor dropped him in shock and Newt landed hard on his knees, blinded by the red haze.

 

             _lightlightlight     i        am here          wherewherewherewhere        needneed need no silence no silence    where where where_

_Cold waters abandoned at last. Surfacing from water, taking a very first breath of air. Water vomited out from damaged innards, salt searing a burnt and broken mouth. Eyes turning to a city – no directive. No directive. No interest. Eyes searching, mind reaching, going straight forward. It sees, it wants, it needs._

_It knows._

 

            “Christ,” Tendo muttered, staring at the screens. “That’s  _Scunner_.”

            Gottlieb knelt beside Newt, an arm thrown protectively around his shoulders. A wide ring had grown around him as though people were afraid to touch him, and through the blinding pain and the alien crush of impressions, Newt was reminded of the kaiju shelter and how he’d been shunned there, too. He was diseased, unclean, dangerous. He was unnatural.  

Outside, the kaiju raised itself from the water, struggling towards the Shatterdome. Every step it took hurt it, and Newt felt the pain of its ruined body as it tortured his own. Burned, blackened, broken, Scunner was dying on its feet but still limping forward.

            Herc stared at the screen with too-wide eyes, thinking only of nuclear fire and a blast that should have killed everything it touched. Tendo’s voice came to him from a long way away, and he had to shake his head hard to clear it.

            “Sir,” Tendo repeated urgently. “What do we do?”

            A category four kaiju, and no Jaegers to fight it with. Only conventional weaponry – useless things. Like beating the ocean back with sticks, throwing rocks at a mountain.

            “Fire _everything_ ,” Herc roared. “Get ground troops organized when it makes landfall,  _and_   _take this son of a bitch OUT!”_

             _Flying things shining lights, blinding damaged eyes. Rocks thudding against thick hide though open wounds sing in agony at their touch. Roaring in rage and pain, clawing at the sky, wanting to make it stop. Catching one in a broken paw, crushing and crushing and_

            “ _NO!”_

Newt jerked away from Gottlieb and fell forwards, one hand balled into a fist so tight his nails bit into his palm. He forced it open and it was agony to do it, one finger uncurling at a time.

            “Let them go! Put it down, let them  _go!”_

_Rage not its own. Pain, fear. It knows, it wants, it needs. Let go. Let go. The broken thing drops from its paw into the water. Small things abandon the wreckage as it sinks beneath cold waves, and it watches them swim towards land. It has no interest in them, though they do not realize this. No directive to kill, no directive to destroy. Nothing. But no more silence. It ignores the remaining flying pest, wading towards the metal shore._

            “How did he-?”

            Newt gasped and coughed, ghosts of Scunner’s pain threatening to overwhelm him. He tried to push himself up and suddenly Gottlieb was there to help him sit up again.

            “I need to go outside,” Newt said, gasping. “Get me outside.”

            “Absolutely not! We-“

            “Will you make  _one correct decision today!_ ” Gottlieb shouted, staring up at Herc furiously. The Marshall paled, face a mask of stifled anger. He looked at Newt for a long moment and the expression broke, and he nodded for a guard.

            “Help him down there and out on the dock. Now.”

            The journey out of LOCCENT and down to the bay floor was a blur of noise and impressions, Newt’s mind and the kaiju’s sending conflicting messages back and forth. He was in an elevator, he was outside. Water sloshed around his legs, he was tripping and falling over his own feet, crashing onto cement. Giant metal doors looming inside and outside, blocking the way.

      _alone alonealone no silence needneedneed pain cold paindyingdying                   dying_

Giant, broken fists raising, preparing to smash against unyielding metal. Doors opening and people shouting, clearing off the bay floor.

Newt wrenched free from his escort and stumbled outside, falling onto his knees on wet metal and concrete. Scunner looked at him, and he looked back.

            Relief crashed through Newt, staggering and overwhelming. No silence. No silence. No directive, but what did it matter? The silence was gone. Not even the pain mattered anymore.

            Scunner dropped onto all fours with a bone-shaking crash, wading up to the dock. It stared down at Newt, and lowered its head down to him. He saw himself being observed and observing, and his own pain faded, no longer important. He forced himself up and walked to the edge of the dock, reaching out his hand. Scunner’s remaining eyes closed as he touched the broken shards of a tusk, blowing out foul-smelling breath in an almost human sigh of relief.

            “Doctor Geiszler?  _Doctor?”_

Noises. Small, squeaking noises. He’d never really noticed the sounds they made before – Newt paused, considering. Himself, or Scunner? Did it matter? Why would it matter? He was complete. The silence was gone.

            “Newton!”

            Newt turned and looked over his shoulder, and Scunner opened its eyes. They watched the crowd of things – humans, people, colleagues, friends – that were at the door. Some held objects of black metal and Newt knew they were  _guns_ , but it held no meaning for Scunner. Unimportant, all of them. Newt dismissed them, uninterested, and turned away.

            There was a sharp rapping of a cane on concrete and shouts of small things – no, humans, people – and they did nothing but irritate him.

            “ _Newton!”_

            That was an important voice. He remembered that one. Newt looked over his shoulder again and watched Gottlieb limp towards him –  _Hermann, friend, genius idiot jerk colleague_  – but he made no move to speak. He knew him, but that didn’t mean he cared. Scunner huffed out another sigh, shifting restlessly.

            “Newton,” Gottlieb repeated, trying to hide how afraid he was. His right eye was bloodshot and a fine trickle of blood was streaking down his face from his nose. “Newton, come back. Come away from it.”

            Newt watched him impassively, turning towards him.

            “Human,” he said softly, and Scunner gave a guttural growl behind him. “ _Gottlieb_.”

            “Come away from it,” Gottlieb said urgently, holding his hand out. “Newton _, please.”_

Newt and Scunner shook their heads, pitying him. He couldn’t understand. No one would ever understand. The silence was gone, and that was what mattered. They would not be parted. Scorched black claws reached down to rest between Newt and Gottlieb, a cage to protect him against them all.

            “No more silence,” Newt said quietly, drawing the words out slowly as though he had never spoken before. “ _Safe.”_

Above him, Scunner threw its head back and roared.

 


	11. Chapter 11

11.

 

            “ _You’ll have to forgive our intense incredulity, Marshall, but what do you mean you’re not going to kill it?”_

            Six hours had passed since Scunner’s arrival. It was still lying half-submerged at the bay dock, refusing to move, ignoring everything. The helicopters and planes from the Corps and Hong Kong media alike didn’t seem to bother it, and for that Herc was counting his blessings. He had no major firepower aside from a small stockpile of warheads, and using even one in such close quarters would mean ruin for the Shatterdome and a chunk of the city.

            “The situation is different than other events, sir,” he said, eyeing the American United Nations representative with thinly veiled dislike. “For one, we don’t have any Jaegers. For two, it’s not an active threat.”

            The UN reps stirred and muttered on each screen, and they all watched him with deep reproach. Herc held his hands up wearily.

            “I know what this looks like.”

            “ _What it looks like is a media fiasco,”_  the Italian representative said. “ _People will react poorly when they see a living kaiju literally at the doorstep of humanity’s main defenders. There are already reports of people fleeing Hong Kong in droves. They are approaching riot-level panic, Marshall.”_

            “Hong Kong does have a police force to regulate evacuations,” Herc snapped. “And China’s got a pretty damn good military from what I recall. I might suggest deploying them rather than leaning on  _us_  for everything.”

            “ _I suggest you watch your tone, sir. You can appreciate our concern about this. Can you even explain how a category four kaiju is not a threat to everyone in that city, Marshall?”_

            Herc sighed, rubbing at his temples. He was so tired and emotionally beaten he had crossed over the line into a new kind of exhaustion, determined to work until his body shut down on him. The thought of Scunner lying on his doorstep made anger boil up in a maddening haze that he fought to control. How  _dare_  that monster be alive? How  _dare_  it?

            “Before the final Breach assault, one of our K-scientists Drifted with a kaiju brain in an experiment to access their hivemind. The experiment yielded results that were vital to the assault’s success, and-”

            “ _We’ve read the mission reports, Marshall. What we’re asking you is why you seem to be so accepting of this…this monstrosity’s presence, and why you’re not actively doing your job to remove it.”_

            A tic worked in Herc’s cheek, and he stared at the gathered screens quietly for a long moment. When he answered, his voice was soft and bitter.

            “We’re not doing anything about it because I don’t want to kill anyone else I’m responsible for.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

            “I’m not going away, Newton. You’ll have to acknowledge me eventually.”

            Mako, Raleigh and Gottlieb stood in a semi-circle in cold drizzling rain, shivering in the winds that gusted off the ocean. Scunner was half-awake and looming above them, reacting to their presence only when anyone tried to approach it or Newt. Its growls shook the ground and its two remaining eyes glared with startling lucidity, and they had given up trying to get closer.

            Gottlieb sighed, contemplating throwing something at Newt to see what would happen. Mako had already dissuaded him from beating Scunner’s arm away with his cane, and Raleigh had had to physically pick him up and restrain him when he had tried to sneak around the kaiju’s claws.

            “I don’t think he hears you,” Mako said softly. There was an unmistakable edge of pain and anger in her voice that she couldn’t hide, and Gottlieb was reminded of just how Scunner had been so badly injured. He looked at her and put a hand on her shoulder, squeezing in as companionable a way as he knew. Mako smiled slightly though it didn’t reach her eyes. Even Raleigh hadn’t been able to comfort her; nothing he could do would help.

            “Your nose is still bleeding,” she said, taking the handkerchief she had originally used for Newt and folding it over, pressing it to Gottlieb’s face. He took it gratefully, trying to clean off the stain. “Are you alright?”

            “Faring better than most, my dear,” he said, and this time her smile was a little more genuine. “Thank you.”

            “Are you  _sure_  you’re okay?” Raleigh asked, giving his bloodshot eye a wary look.

            “Consider it a visual display of sympathy pains,” Gottlieb said, nodding towards Scunner. “I may not share Newton’s particular bond with this… _thing,_ but…”

            “You are still connected with him,” Mako said, looking up at the kaiju with a carefully blank expression. It was staring down at all of them, and she shuddered. Raleigh echoed the reaction without even thinking about it, though he didn’t bother to hide his anger and loathing as he looked at Scunner.

            “Do you think it even knows how much it’s been hurting him?”

            “I doubt it,” Gottlieb said. “And I highly doubt it would care even if it did know, no matter the obsessive value it’s placed on him.”

            They fell silent, watching. Newt had sat down after the first two hours, leaning against the kaiju’s broken tusk. He hadn’t spoken once since Gottlieb had tried to draw him away though his mouth was constantly moving, talking silently to himself. The shapes had a pattern Gottlieb could read off his lips;  _safe, quiet, pain, cold._ Over and over like a mantra, Newt mouthed the words to himself, translating Scunner’s thoughts.

            “Newton, are you cold?” Gottlieb called. “It’s dreadful out here. You’ll catch your death.”

             _Safe, quiet, pain, cold._  Newt didn’t bother looking up, and Scunner made an ugly sound at the back of its throat. Gottlieb took a step closer, giving Raleigh a warning look as the man reached out to stop him.

            “You can ignore me all you want, but you know I’m right,” he said, edging as close as he dared to the kaiju’s arm. “I usually am with these things. You can hardly take care of yourself half the time. I found you prone with that ridiculous thing on your head that started this mess, and you never even thanked me for mopping you up.”

            Newt’s eyes flickered open. Scunner shifted its arm, claw tips scratching deep channels into the concrete. Gottlieb took another step, clutching the head of his cane so tightly he could feel the embossed patterns pressing into his skin.

            “Look at this. Every time I leave you alone for five  _minutes_ , you cause disaster. Do you…do you remember, the third year we were working together? We were visiting Vladivostok,” he said, trying to keep his voice even. He could almost feel Scunner’s gaze beating down on him. “And you wandered away to find a vending machine. You ended up on the Jaeger bay floor and they arrested you for trespassing.”

            The pattern of Newt’s muttering was starting to stumble, and he lifted his head slightly. Scunner growled at the back of its throat again, claws digging deeper in unspoken threat.

            “Doctor Gottlieb,” Mako hissed. “Don’t.”

            “And you were trying to convince them you were with the Corp, but you’d forgotten your bloody ID badge in the plane,” Gottlieb went on, ignoring Mako and Scunner and everything else around him, willing Newt to hear him. “Marshall Pentecost was furious when he found you in lock-up. I thought he was going to strangle you. Do you remember?”

            Newt looked up, studying Gottlieb’s face as though he’d never seen him before. Recognition flickered after a moment, and then remembrance. He nodded very slowly.

            “I do,” he said, voice flat and distant. 

            “Come away from it, Newton,” Gottlieb said in a low voice, coaxing. “You’re not well.”

Scunner hissed in warning, and Newt turned away indifferently, resting his head against Scunner’s tusk and closing his eyes. Pain twisted behind Gottlieb’s right eye and he flinched at it, backing away and pressing Mako’s handkerchief to his nose.

“He’s not yours to enslave like this,” he spat, staring up at Scunner. “You have no right. You and your masters never had any right to be here at all.”

            The kaiju ignored him. Gottlieb turned away in useless anger, storming past Mako and Raleigh to go back inside.  

 


	12. Chapter 12

12.

 

            Raleigh found Gottlieb in the lab an hour after he’d stormed off the dock, writing row after row of numbers on his chalkboards. He muttered them under his breath in a ceaseless flow, so caught up in his work that Raleigh was almost afraid to disturb him. He cleared his throat to announce himself and went ignored. Gottlieb attacked the board like it was an enemy he was trying to kill, smashing the chalk against it as he wrote. He broke one stick and immediately reached into his pocket for another, voice escalating in a spurt of anger.

            “-eight, nine, five, seven, five,  _eight, two, five!”_

The chalk broke again and Gottlieb flung it across the room. He leaned heavily on his cane and pressed a hand against the board, taking a moment to calm down before slowly erasing the partially written five with his fingertips.

            “Doctor Gottlieb,” Raleigh said. Gottlieb’s shoulders hunched and he looked around slowly, a faint red flush in his face. He seemed ashamed of his outburst, casting his eyes down to the floor.

            “Hello, Raleigh,” he said. “I didn’t…please, forgive me. I didn’t realize you were here.”

            “Just came in a second ago,” Raleigh said, shoving his hands into his pockets and leaning against Gottlieb’s desk. “I wanted to check in. See if you needed anything.”

            “I’m fine, thank you,” Gottlieb said abruptly. “I must lose myself in action-”

            “Lest you wither in despair.”

            Raleigh grinned at the blatantly surprised look on Gottlieb’s face, and laughed when he tried to hide it.

            “I know, I know. I think I might’ve read it from a fortune cookie.”

            Gottlieb blinked, processing the joke and then smiling almost reluctantly. He limped over to Raleigh and leaned against the desk beside him, staring down at the floor again. Raleigh stayed quiet, looking around the lab. He liked the messiness in Newt’s area; one project flowing into the next, one idea turning into another. Newt’s genius was laid out in the open in that sea of junk and disorder, and Raleigh wished he had the ability to understand it.

            “He’s filthy,” Gottlieb said dryly. “Surgical equipment left unwashed, samples left in the open. It’s lucky he hasn’t caught tetanus by now.”

            “Maybe he forgets.”

            “Oh, undoubtedly. He never stops. He lets his ideas control him and steer him where they will. No foresight for repercussions. He simply wants to add one element to another and see what happens.”

            Raleigh glanced over at Gottlieb, then the chalkboards.

            “What are you working on?”          

            Gottlieb smiled again, faintly.

            “A pet project of mine, actually. Pi.”

            “What, three-point-one-four?”

            Gottlieb nodded, pushing away from the desk and walking back to the boards. He swept his hand against the numbers he’d scrawled so angrily, obliterating the barely legible marks.

            “A string of numbers without end. I’ve been mapping it for…must be fifteen years now. One after the other after the other, a perfect chain.”

            “Why?”

            “Because the concept of eternity is appealing,” Gottlieb said, picking up one of the broken stubs of chalk and rewriting a seven with a carefully controlled flourish. “The universe is built upon mathematics. The one pure language, an absolute no matter how you approach it. Why not see if I could tease out a few secrets of our reality by following the pattern?”

            “Sounds fun,” Raleigh said. Gottlieb gave a small laugh.

            “It’s absorbing, at the very least. Everything is mathematics in the end. The number of breaths you take, the hours you sleep. How many steps you walk. Life is…a grand, beautiful pattern.”

            Gottlieb wrote a few more numbers before setting the chalk down, wiping the dust off his fingers with Mako’s handkerchief. Raleigh stayed quiet, glancing over at Newt’s area again.

            “I can…I can leave, Doctor. If I’m disturbing you.”

            Gottlieb shook his head, glancing over his shoulder.

            “I find I no longer work as efficiently in silence as I once did,” he said quietly. “Trying to tune out Newton’s incessant prattle has become rather vital to my concentration.”

            He turned away from the boards, limping aimlessly into the middle of the lab. He looked at Newt’s collection of kaiju specimens and there was a flicker of loathing on his face.

            “Never understood why he became so enamored to them,” he growled, more to himself than Raleigh. “Ruinous monsters, that’s all they are. How could anyone love them?  _Why_  would they?”

            “Because they’re incredible,” Raleigh said. Gottlieb looked at him in surprise. “They are. They’re beautiful in their way.”

            “Like the mushroom cloud of an atom bomb is beautiful,” Gottlieb said, nodding slightly. “Yes, I…I can see your point.”

            He turned away from Newt’s half of the room, staring at Raleigh as though he’d never quite seen him before.

            “How do you bear it?” he asked.

            “What?”

            “This,” Gottlieb said, tapping his temple above his right eye. “This…bond. This connection. The sheer unnaturalness of it.”

            “It’s not a burden.”  

            “It is,” Gottlieb said fiercely. He glared at Raleigh. “It’s like being chained to a stone and thrown into the sea to drown. I struggle against it and I cannot  _free_ myself from it.”   

            Raleigh shook his head, holding his hands up.

            “That’s what the Drift is,” he said. “When you find someone compatible with you, it  _is_  natural. You become more. You’re bonded and chained. You take the good and the bad.”

            Gottlieb closed his eyes, rubbing at them as though trying to dispel a headache.       

            “I try to feel where he is within our bond and there is nothing there,” he said. “Impressions of coldness and suffocation, that’s all I find. That  _creature_  is crushing him under the weight of its own disgusting mind and I cannot do anything to help him.”

            He looked at Raleigh helplessly.

            “How do you bear it?” he asked again, and his voice cracked on the words.

            “By understanding there’s no other choice,” Raleigh said. “You shoulder the weight because letting it overwhelm you means it’ll break you. Yancy dying almost broke me.”          

            “But you found Miss Mori. I do not have the benefit of finding another so compatible,” Gottlieb muttered. Raleigh shook his head.

            “I didn’t replace one with the other. Yancy’s in my head. Always will be. I just refuse to let it break me.”

            “I think  _I_  may break,” Gottlieb said bleakly.

            “No,” Raleigh said. “No you wouldn’t. You’re too stubborn.”

            Gottlieb was silent for a long moment and finally dropped his gaze, limping back towards the chalkboards.

            “I think I would like some time alone after all,” he said, not turning around. “If you would be so kind.”

            When he looked over his shoulder again Raleigh was already gone. Gottlieb sighed heavily, taking out a fresh stick of chalk and beginning to write once more.

 


	13. Chapter 13

13.

 

            Mako stood in the rain as it pelted her, ignoring the cold and wind alike. The burnt, rotting smell coming off the dying kaiju was sickening, every breeze throwing it in her face and making her stomach lurch. Scunner’s struggling breaths bubbled and wheezed far above her; she didn’t look up at it, though she knew it was watching her.

            Newt was still huddled against Scunner, exposed to the elements. He looked sick and haggard in the morning light and Mako wanted more than anything to vault Scunner’s claws and grab him. Any time she took more than a few steps forward the kaiju would snarl, gnashing its remaining teeth at her.

Seagulls picked at the shredded remains of one of Scunner’s eyes and at its burnt flesh, roosting unconcernedly on its head and back. The kaiju occasionally tried to shake them off but they were starting to come in droves, swarming it like flies. A few of them had already dropped dead out of the air, poisoned by its blood. Mako prayed none of it got on Newt; though he was so messy in the lab with his specimens she was honestly surprised he hadn’t poisoned himself already. She watched him shiver and cough with growing worry.

            “Doctor Geiszler,” she called. “Are you awake?”

            He didn’t answer, though she hadn’t really counted on him to. She looked up at Scunner and found its eyes were closed, rolling under tattered lids. It was asleep.

            Well, then. Time to do something remarkably stupid.

Steeling herself, certain Scunner’s claws would crush her at any moment, she crept towards Newt.

            “Doctor Geiszler,” she repeated, kneeling in front of him. She glanced up; Scunner still hadn’t seen her. She reached out and shook his shoulder. “Doctor Geiszler, please. Wake up.”

            Newt’s head lolled and pitched forward, and he jerked back with a start. He locked eyes with Mako and stared at her, lips skinning back from his teeth in an animal snarl. He caught her by the arm and his fingers dug into her flesh. She grimaced, refusing to make a sound even as his nails drew blood. The viciousness that showed so plainly on his face frightened her – Newt didn't have it in him to be violent or cruel. He gripped harder and she exhaled sharply, tears of pain blurring her vision.

            “Newt,” she breathed, certain he was going to break her arm. “You’re  _hurting_ me.”

            The vicious look faded, and Newt stared at her in genuine confusion.

            “Mako?” he asked, his hands falling away. He looked startled at the deep crescents he’d cut into her arm, staring at the bright red streaks washing away with the rain.

            “It’s okay,” she said, refusing to flinch as he grabbed weakly at her arm again, though he was only examining the gouges.

            “Did I…?”

            “Not...not you. Not really.”

            Newt’s hands dropped again and he coughed, wheezing as badly as Scunner. He pushed his glasses up his nose and squinted through the rain streaked lenses, trying to get his bearings.

            “You need to get away from me before it wakes up again,” he said. “It’ll kill you.”

            “You stopped it from destroying that helicopter last night,” Mako whispered back. “It listens to you.”

            Newt laughed humorlessly, shaking his head. “It’s a lot stronger than I am. It’s not going to listen to me again.”

            “Come inside with me, then,” she said, trying to grab his hand. “It’s hurting you. I can help you back inside.”

            “No _._ I’ll…I’ll be okay. Go.”

            They stared at each other for a moment, and Mako gave serious thought to throwing him over her shoulder and running. Scunner shifted and took in a deep, struggling breath, and Newt hissed in sudden pain, eyes squeezing shut.

            “Mako,  _run!_ ”

Scunner’s eyes opened one by one, and it looked down. It stared at her and Mako saw that same viciousness in its ruined face. One of its stunted secondary arms suddenly swung down and bashed against the dock, smashing concrete and metal in rage. It snarled at her and snapped its teeth, craning down to catch her.

            “No _,_ ” Newt shouted, rolling over and pushing himself up to stand. “ _NO!”_

Scunner hesitated and Newt slammed his hands against its arm.

            “ _Leave her alone!”_

Mako had fallen backwards and was pushing herself across the dock, scraping her hands to shreds and catching her clothing on the rough ground. Her heart pounded in her ears and her breath came out in rapid bursts, and suddenly bay workers who had been watching from the doors were picking her up and pulling her inside. Newt fell heavily to the ground and Scunner turned its gaze on him, the snarl fading into a reprimanding hiss.

             “No directive,” Newt said, voice barely above a whisper. “Don’t hurt anyone.”

            Scunner shook its head as though in disgust, laying back down. Its mind washed over him in a smothering haze and Newt barely had time to struggle before it overwhelmed him again.

 

 

* * *

 

 

            “I cannot believe you would willingly do something so stupid, Ranger Mori. Explain yourself.”

            Ignoring the itching bandages on her arm and the painful cuts on her hands, Mako stood at stiff attention as Herc stared at her. He looked so tired she thought he would drop to the floor at any moment.

            “I needed to try,” she said. “It may be killing him.”

            “If you’re choosing between  _one person_  and a facility of over a thousand and a city of ten million, I think we can afford to be cruel,” Herc snapped. “Do not try a stunt like that again. Clear?”

            “Yes, sir.”

            “Good. Go.”

            Mako turned to leave, then hesitated. Herc had sat heavily behind his desk, pulling a pile of folders towards him. He looked up at her.

            “I said go.”

            “What is going to happen when it dies?”

            Herc sighed, leaning back in his chair.

            “We could throw it a funeral if you like.”

            Mako’s blank-calm expression slipped for an instant, and Herc had the grace to look embarrassed.

            “That was…excuse me, Mako,” he said. “When the kaiju dies, we’ll remove it. Hannibal Chau’s been absent from the scene long enough that we may not have to worry about honoring trade deals with him anymore. I’ve got other people who want to see what makes this bastard tick. They’ll be getting the carcass.”

            “That is not what I meant.”

            Herc hesitated, then shook his head.

            “I don’t know what it’s going to do to him. Pilots have died while Drifting together before, you know that. It’s traumatizing to the survivor but it’s normally not fatal.”

            “He is not connected with another human,” Mako said. “And this…this isn’t Drifting. It is like an infection in him. It is  _changing_ him.”

            “I don’t know, Mako,” Herc repeated quietly. “All we can do is…wait it out.”

            “And hope?”

            “Hope never hurt anybody.”

            Mako fell silent, then bowed slightly and turned away. Through the open bay doors and reverberating into the Shatterdome, she could hear Scunner growling outside. 

 

 

 

 


	14. Chapter 14

14.

 

            It was the sound of distant klaxons that woke Newt up. He was flat on his back on a rubble-strewn street, smoke from raging fires making his eyes water and clogging his throat. He sat up, looking around at the ruin that surrounded him. Crushed cars, shattered buildings…he looked down and realized he had been lying on broken glass and rebar. He rolled to his feet and staggered a step backwards, taking in the sheer scope of it all. The klaxons droned on, the call echoing on empty streets.

            Newt wandered through the minefield of rubble. He coughed in the smoke, wincing at the ashen taste that dried his mouth. He skirted around a burning car and almost fell twelve feet into a pit in the road, the wide hole stretching thirty feet across. He stared at it, puzzled, before it clicked what it was: a footprint.

            Kneeling, Newt peered down to the bottom of the print. Several cars had been caught in the walker’s path, crushed together in a flattened mangle. He stood and tried to see through the smoke to find another path forward. There was nothing but metal, fire and glass; no people screaming or running, no police sirens. Even the call of the klaxons had stopped.

Perfect silence.

 

             _silencesilencesilencesilence directive   no    directive_

_i            am                   lost_

            “This isn’t real,” Newt whispered to himself. He looked upwards and saw a patchwork sky, pieces bleeding one into the other. Rain clouds, sunlight, bits of skies he recognized. Sunlight filtered below ocean waves. Scraps of stars and nebulous gases. Newt rubbed his eyes and shook his head hard, trying to focus.

            He took his hands away and he was somewhere else. Ash fell like snow as he stood on the remains of a huge ruined bridge, broken support cables swaying. He climbed on top of an overturned Jeep and thought of calling out for help, but he knew no one would hear him. A squadron of fighter jets ripped through the smoky sky above him and he watched them, and far out in the water, eyes set on the city, Trespasser swatted them away like flies. It threw its head back and roared, and Newt clapped his hands to his ears, trying to block it out.

            The roar shook through him to the bones and he fell off the Jeep, landing hard on his side. He opened his eyes and he was on a slushy street, breath rising in a cloud above him. He pushed himself up, wrapped his arms around him

 

             _coldcoldcold  so cold now       tireddyingpain dying  dying dying_

            and walked forward. He recognized this street. He could walk it blindfolded in the middle of a blizzard and still know his way, step by step. Hell, he could probably walk Boston from the MIT campus to the South End and never need to look where he was going. Faneuil Hall stood a short way away like an inviting beacon, but he turned away and pushed through faceless crowds, deeper into the dark streets. And they  _were_  faceless – nothing but flickers of color and muted voices, speaking in tones and pitches rather than words. He tried not to look at them.

            He wasn’t wandering this time; he remembered this night perfectly. He looked around and, yes, there was his old truck, sitting in the alley alongside The Black Rose bar. How the hell he and his shitty band had landed the gig he still didn’t know, only that it hadn’t been a particularly good show. Thank God for hockey games and five dollar wing-and-beer specials, otherwise they would have been thrown out on principle alone.

            “-why they constantly make me break down everything, Jesus Christ I’m  _grading_  half of them-“

            Newt watched himself loading his truck with the detachment of a dreamer. He knew how this story played out. He stepped to the left and Stacker Pentecost filled the void, walking towards the ghost of himself as he loaded up gear.

            “Doctor Geiszler?”

            The ghost turned, red faced from the cold and squinting into the dark.

            “Yeah, that’s me. Please, no autographs.”

            Newt smiled slightly to himself, watching Pentecost. He had always intimidated Newt, just a little; a war hero, the Pan Pacific Defense Corps leader and the face of resistance against the kaiju. Who wouldn’t have been intimidated?

 

             _Mako wasn’t she loved him I hurt her was it me did I hurt her didn’t mean to I’msorryI’msorryI’msorry_

 

            “I’ve been looking for you,” Pentecost said, watching the ghost as it sat heavily on the truck’s bumper, wiping sweat off its forehead. It watched Pentecost with interest.

            “Well,” the ghost said. “I guess you found me. What d’you want?”

            Pentecost smiled thinly, clasping his hands behind his back.

            “How would you like to help save the world?”

            Newt turned away without waiting for the answer. The street turned from cobblestone to the same patchwork as the sky, and Newt closed his eyes as he walked, willing himself to wake up.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

            Eyes opened to stare at a steely gray sky. Wheezing breaths rattling in burnt lungs. Focus…couldn’t focus. Everything hurt. Blistered skin, raw wounds caked in dried salt and grit. Pain was the only fixed point, the only thing to hold onto. The other mind was distracted, lost within the hive. Still there, still maintaining sanity. But no longer resisting.

            The doors were still open, and a line of men with guns stood vigil, ready and waiting. The effort to stand was incredible, legs that felt like they would give out at any moment shaking with each awkward step. The men at the door aimed their guns in unison, but there was confusion in their faces. They wouldn’t fire.

            “Doctor Geiszler?” one of them asked.

            Breath drawn in and wheezed out. Words, words without meaning.

 

             _namesnamesnames geiszlerhumanhiveself self self self I am myself_

**“** No,” Scunner said slowly, and it was Newt’s voice it used. It stared at the soldier and its eyes were weak and blurry. Beyond every pain of its body

             _dyingdyingdying  water         cold cold         hurtshurtshurts_

 there was pain in its stomach.  _His_  stomach. Newt. He, his, him. Self. The thoughts buzzed in its – his – head, and he shook it as though trying to dispel them. No self within the hive. One was everyone. Different aspects in different shells, one mind in a hundred bodies.

            “What do we do?”

            “Call the Marshall.”

            Scunner-now-Newt raised his hand and pushed one of the guns aiming at him aside. The soldier moved with it, recoiling. Inside was warm and dry, and even the bay floor teeming with humans didn’t lessen the appeal.

            _Cold,_ Scunner thought, and the word was spoken flatly out loud. “I am…I am cold.”

            “We can’t just let him in, can we?”

            “ _Hell_ no.”

            In the water, Scunner hissed and bared its teeth, and Newt mimicked it. The soldier paled and tried to hold his ground as Newt clutched the barrel of his assault rifle.

            “Get out…of my  _way,_ ” Scunner snarled, grasping blindly for the words. The shell’s mind was barely compatible with the hive. If this shell had been any of its kin, connection would have been seamless, painless.

 

             _weakweakweak hate it hate it           hate     it         hatehatehatehatehate_

 

Pain pulsed behind Newt’s left eye in an insistent, exhausting ache. He let go of the gun’s barrel and fell back a step. The line of guards was unmoved though the confusion in them was replaced with revulsion and fear now. The pain roiled in Newt’s stomach and he hugged his arms around himself, a growl rattling at the back of his throat.

            “Seems like he’s hungry.”

            “Marshall,” one of the men said. “We…”

            Herc pushed past the line of guards. The growl died down as Newt stared at him, head tilted to the side. In Leatherback’s shell he had seen this face before, before flare guns had put out two of his eyes.

 

     _waterrain night jaeger painpainpain  jaeger stilled shocked broken                   jaeger broken_

 

            “Who am I talking to?” Herc asked. Newt shook his head, blinking rapidly.

            “I know you,” he said, the flatness in his voice belying the loathing shifting beneath the surface. “T…two. Jaeger. Two.”

            Herc flinched as though Newt had struck him, and there was a flicker of pain across his face. Scunner’s pleasure at the reaction showed through Newt, a cruel little smile twisting his lips.

            “Two,” he repeated, spitting out the word. “Leatherback. I…I am. We are.”

            “So it’s not Newton at the wheel, then,” Herc said, rubbing at his eyes wearily. “Got it.”

             _“Two,_ ” Newt said again, willing Herc to flinch. Willing him to be weak and show his suffering again.

            “Yeah, there were two of us,” Herc replied, and his voice was controlled. Newt bared his teeth in a disappointed grimace. “So who are you? Leatherback or Scunner?”

            “All.”

“Right, of course. That makes total sense.”

            The sarcasm was lost on Newt entirely and he stared at Herc, clicking his teeth in annoyance. Herc stepped back and the guards cleared the way for him and he turned to Newt, gesturing for him to follow.

            “Well. Since you’re being  _nice_  enough to let him walk around a bit, we can get him fed and dried off. Get inside.”

            Newt stared at him for a long moment, and without a word he staggered slowly into the Shatterdome.

 

 


	15. Chapter 15

15.

 

            “You _cannot_ be serious.”

            Gottlieb regarded Herc with narrowed eyes and an obstinate expression. The Marshall stared back at him, looking like he was seriously thinking about kicking away Gottlieb’s cane and walking off as soon as he hit the floor.

            “You’ve been to visit him. There’s no reason I cannot be afforded the same privilege.”

            “It’s not a privilege. He was attacking his guards and I ran in to  _intervene_. You  _don’t_ want to be around him right now, Hermann. You wouldn’t last two minutes in that room.”

            Newt had been in lockdown for almost a full day down in the brig. He had been given a shower, a fresh change of clothes and food, but after being told he would not be allowed back outside with the dying kaiju he had become incredibly aggressive. One guard was now nursing a broken collarbone and another was concussed – under the kaiju’s influence, Newt had found an alarming proficiency for dirty fighting.

             “He will not attack me,” Gottlieb insisted. Herc rolled his eyes heavenward, throwing his hands up.

            “You’re not hearing a damn thing I’m saying. Newt isn’t home right now, you understand? Whatever that thing is, it is a far cry from anything human. And I don’t feel like losing another vital person if I can avoid it.”

            “I appreciate your concern for my safety, but I would not ask unless I found it imperative,” Gottlieb said, following doggedly as Herc pushed past him. “I just…I need to…”

            Herc stopped short and turned to look at Gottlieb, who cleared his throat and looked at the floor.

            “You need to see if he’s alright,” Herc said. Gottlieb hesitated, and then nodded. “Well, I can tell you. He’s  _not_  alright. And going to see him isn’t going to make anything better. So let it go and wait this out with the rest of us. Clear?”

            “Yes, sir,” Gottlieb muttered, still looking at the floor. Herc ducked his head to catch Gottlieb’s eye.

            “Say it to my face, Hermann.”

            Gottlieb straightened, staring at Herc with definite resentment.

            “ _Yes_ , sir.”

           

 

* * *

 

 

 

            “I should really be clearing this with the Marshall, sir.”

            “The Marshall is handling several different things of varying importance at the moment,” Gottlieb said briskly. “If you would like to waste his time rehashing who has permission to go where, you’re more than welcome to. I’m sure he’ll only demote you one or two ranks.”

            The brig guard shifted uncomfortably behind his desk, one hand hovering over the phone. Gottlieb watched him coolly, his face a mask of indifference.

            “He broke a guy’s collarbone,” the guard said.

            “Merely a hairline fracture from what I’ve heard. Nothing life-threatening.”

            The guard picked up the phone and Gottlieb resisted the urge to twitch. He had a terrible poker face and this was stretching his ability to bluff to its very limits. The guard wavered, and then set the phone down again.

            “Not a lot of people want to go in that room.”

            “Then assign me one or two that have lower standards of self-preservation. I am going in that room whether I am accompanied or not.”

            Five minutes later Gottlieb was escorted down a hall full of empty rooms and cells by two armed guards. The brig had seen very little use during wartime; most people in the PPDC were busier focusing on surviving through the day than causing trouble within the ranks. Newt’s cell was at the end of the hall, sporting a heavy door with several locks.

            “I didn’t realize we had high security cells,” Gottlieb said dryly.

            “Just the one. Never had to use it before, either,” one of his guards said. “He cracked a guy’s head open, y’know.”

            “A concussion is not the same as splitting someone’s skull,” Gottlieb muttered. The guard shrugged, putting a hand to his pistol meaningfully. Gottlieb glared at him. “Violence will not be necessary.”

            “Says  _you_ , Doctor. You didn’t see how bad he got.”

            “Open the damn door,” Gottlieb snapped. The guard shrugged again and pulled out his key ring, unlocking the door and pulling it open. Flanked on either side by armed guards Gottlieb felt like he was visiting Newt in the medical bay all over again – until he stepped inside. The sharp click of the closing door reminded Gottlieb of jaws snapping shut.

The man sitting at the bolted down table was not Newton Geiszler. He watched Gottlieb sit down opposite him on a folding chair one of the guards had brought for him, and his gaze was vicious and predatory. He looked from one guard to the other and an inhuman growl rattled at the back of his throat.

“None of that, sir,” Gottlieb said softly. “They are merely an unfortunate requirement for my visit. They won’t be doing anything.”

The growl tapered off and the thing wearing Newt’s face looked away in disinterest.

“Leave me alone.”

“I wanted to see you.”

“You have. Leave me alone.”

Gottlieb sat back, studying Newt. It was the eyes that were so off about him; they seemed inhuman, rendered flat and lifeless. He’d become a husk for the kaiju’s mind to steer where it willed. The thought was sickening and Gottlieb found himself unable to hold Newt’s gaze for long, instead looking around the room.

“Why are you doing this?”

Newt muttered something sour under his breath, folding his arms on the table and resting his head down against them. Gottlieb kicked the table leg and Newt glared up at him resentfully.

“Not doing anything,” he said. His voice was a droning monotone, as though he didn’t know how to inflect words properly. Even so, Gottlieb could still sense the belligerence under that flat tone.

“No, I suppose sitting and sulking wouldn’t count as much of anything. I imagine you’d rather be rampaging in the city and killing civilians. Your brother and sister in arms wreaked a very impressive amount of damage before they were put down.”

Newt’s eyes narrowed dangerously, and Gottlieb gave a bland smile.

“Ah, my apologies. No doubt the memories of their incredibly  _crushing_  and  _painful_  defeats are a bit of a sore spot. Terribly rude of me.”

The guards fidgeted uncomfortably as Newt stared at Gottlieb, every line of his body crying out how much he wanted to jump over the table and tackle him.

“What,” Newt said, voice dropping aggressively. “Do you  _want._ ”

“I want my friend back,” Gottlieb said at once, expression hard. “I want you to let him go.”

“I need him more than you do,” Newt said, voice pitching unsteadily with banked anger. “He’s  _mine.”_

“With all due respect, sir, he belongs to himself,” Gottlieb said. “You have no right to do what you’ve done. You are, as you and your kind have  _alway_ s been, an unwelcome presence. I am asking you  _politely_  to rescind your hold on him.”

Newt stared at him with undeniable bafflement. Gottlieb sighed.

“I’m sorry, was that too many big words in a row?” he asked. Newt hissed softly, sitting back and working his jaw in definite annoyance. For a moment he was almost human again, reaching the end of his tether after yet another argument.

“You can’t have him,” he said, turning away and closing his eyes. “ _Mine_.”

 _“_ Yes, you and your masters are good at grubbing like greedy children for things that don’t belong to you,” Gottlieb said, voice raising. “Sweeping in and taking whatever you feel you’re entitled to. How could I expect anything different?”

            Newt’s eyes snapped open and he lunged over the table, grabbing at Gottlieb’s collar and dragging him forward, enraged.

 _“QUIET!”_ he shouted. Gottlieb grabbed his wrists and wrenched himself free, falling back into his chair. Both guards had their weapons drawn and trained on Newt, but he ignored them as he eased himself back. Gottlieb hid his fear well, smoothing out his shirt and giving Newt an imperious look.

“You lose your temper like a child as well,” he said, and there was only a slight tremor in his voice. “What a great and terrible monster you are.”

Newt clutched and pawed at his head and growled fiercely, taking his intense frustration out on himself. “Leave,” he said. “ _Leave!”_

“I will not,” Gottlieb said coldly. “You think you can frighten me away with a tantrum?”

“He’s  _gone!”_ Newt shouted, slamming his hands on the table. “ _Lost _!_ ”_

“What do you mean?”

The fear that slipped into Gottlieb’s voice made Newt smile viciously, and he tapped at his head in a knowing way.

“Gone,” he repeated. “Lost.”

“You’re lying,” Gottlieb hissed. “You’re lying, you wretched thing. You’re clinging to him because  _you_  are the one afraid to be alone. You’re a  _coward._ ”

The smile simply grew wider, and Gottlieb leaned forward, unable to resist Newt’s baiting.

“You and your ilk are warmongering animals,” he snapped. “We did nothing to provoke you, we never wanted anything to  _do_  with you. You come here and provoke war and…and…”

Anger choked him and he fell silent, simply glaring. Newt watched him, the smile fading into a cold, blank stare.

“War?”

“Yes. I’m sure you’ve a passing familiarity with the term. We’ve had ten years of it with you  _beasts._ ”

Newt’s hands shot out and slammed down against Gottlieb’s before he could even react, pinning them. The guards made as though to pull Gottlieb away but Newt snarled at them, clawing to keep hold.

“Get  _back,_  you fools,” Gottlieb hissed, voice strained. Newt looked from the guards to him spitefully.

“You think…this was war?” he asked. Gottlieb resisted the urge to cry out as Newt slowly crushed his hands. “This was not  _war.”_

“So explain it, then,” Gottlieb said. His voice was cracking with pain, and he could feel Newt’s nails drawing blood. “T-ten…ten years of violence feels like war to  _me_.”

Newt shook his head slowly, almost radiating malice. “War ruins,” he said. “It burns. Destroys. We did not come to  _ruin_. We came to make it ready for them. That’s what they made us for.”

Gottlieb’s hands were in agony and still he refused to cry out. He wouldn’t give Newt – no.  _No._ He would not give  _Scunner_ the satisfaction. Newt was not vicious like this. There was no violence in him.

“So you were just tilling the land, then?” Gottlieb asked.

“Yes,” Newt – Scunner – said softly. “But war is what is  _coming.”_

Gottlieb went very still, and Scunner smiled again slightly.

“War is coming,” he repeated. “A hundred doors opening, and they will come. And everything will  _burn.”_

He let go at last and Gottlieb eased back into his chair, cradling his injured hands to his chest. He looked up at Scunner for a moment, and then he laughed derisively.

“Are you trying to  _frighten_  me?”

Scunner stared at him and Gottlieb shook his head as though in pity.

“Look at you,” he said. “This is what you’ve been reduced to. You wear a human face like a mask and try to pretend you’re still a threat. You’re nothing,  _kaiju_. You’re a shade, and your time has passed.”

Scunner paled, drawing away from Gottlieb and staring at him in growing confusion. Gottlieb sat straighter, deliberately putting his hands down on the table again.

“Fade away, Scunner,” he said, almost gently. “Fade away and slither back into the dark. Your life is measured in hours and we simply do not have the time to deal with something as pitifully  _irrelevant_  as you.”

Scunner stood and backed away, hunching down as though he were being shouted at. Gottlieb stood and watched him for a moment and then shook his head in disapproval.

“I’ll be wanting my friend back in acceptable condition,” he said. “Do try not to damage him.”

He turned away, and his guards quickly opened the door and swept outside. The door slammed shut and Scunner flinched like a whipped animal at the sound, sinking down to the floor as though trying to hide.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	16. Chapter 16

16.

 

If death was like wandering in the Drift, Newt was having very mixed feelings about the whole thing. There were no solid concepts like time or distance. He didn’t get tired or hungry. The pain was gone as well, so at least there was that. But it came at the price of wandering without direction through memories, and he had seen a lot of things he wished he hadn’t- like the kaiju attack on Hawaii. Ceramander had razed a good part of the city before it was stopped.

It  _had_  been nice to see Striker Eureka and Coyote Tango again, though. Newt had sat on the beach and watched the battle right in front of him – and when Ceramander fled into the water, directly  _over_  him. The memory faded into the patchwork limbo as Ceramander fell broken and bleeding onto the shore, and Newt stood with a sigh. It didn’t matter which way he went; no matter the direction he would stumble into another memory. He’d had already crossed through several of his own, disjointed and streaming one to the other. He hated finding his own. It was easier to get distracted and forget where he was when he entered familiar rooms or found himself surrounded by comforting faces, and he could feel himself slipping inch by inch.

 _Don’t chase the rabbit_ , that’s what the pilots always said.  _If you chase it, you’re lost._

Newt brushed the clinging residue of sand off his pants and started walking again, hands shoved into his pockets. He was still wearing the PPDC coveralls, a size too big and itchy around the collar. Funny how it was the little unimportant details that could be the strongest. An annoying tag in the shirt, a voice calling his name.

The world seemed to blur around him and Newt blinked. When the brief half-second of darkness passed he was in Manila, and the rank smell of kaiju droppings oozing into the ground burned at the back of his throat. People streamed around him like water around a stone, screaming and fleeing. Newt put a hand out experimentally and it phased through a weeping man’s face like he was made of smoke. Planes roared overhead, the staccato rattle of gunfire setting Newt’s teeth on edge. To his far left, the rampaging kaiju batted them out of the air or caught them in crushing jaws.

Newt turned away from the fight and walked down a street clogged with rubble. He climbed to the top of a pile that had once been a house and jumped down, landing hard. The air had turned icy cold and it was snowing. Signs in Russian, Czech, Hungarian and a dozen other languages Newt didn’t recognize all proclaimed the site off-limits and for authorized personnel only. Newt cursed under his breath. Vladivostok. The airstrip. That meant-

“Look, I was hungry, okay? I didn’t mean to cause a giant fuss about-”

“Doctor Geiszler, to say I am not in the mood for your excuses is an understatement. We are trying to build healthy, trusting relationships with people who have a lot of firepower and resources that  _we need._ ”

_No. Don’t. Don’t chase it. Don’t chase it don’t chase it don’t   chase_

“Hermann said he was hungry too. He’s the one that told me to go,” Newt said, pointing to Gottlieb. Bundled up in an oversized parka, the hood drawn up and a thick scarf wrapped around his face to protect him from the Russian cold, Gottlieb made an unintelligible reply. Marshall Pentecost looked at them both in withering disgust, shooing them onto the plane.

Newt was halfway up the boarding ramp before he regained control, head jerking back as though he’d been struck. He fell off the ramp and landed hard on the ground, breath knocked out of him in a huff.

“Get ahold of yourself, idiot,” he muttered, thumping the back of his head against the tarmac. There was no one to pull the plug and draw him out of the Drift here, and it was getting harder and harder to resist the pull of his own memories. He’d stopped watching them from the sidelines; he was actively  _in them_  now, an actor in a play forgetting everything else.

He pushed himself up and Vladivostok was gone. Hong Kong’s bone slums on a cold, rainy night greeted him, rows of nuns singing as they walked past him and into the kaiju-skull temple. He didn’t dare look up in case he saw himself and his ill-fated conversation with Hannibal Chau, instead turning and jogging through the crowds to get somewhere,  _anywhere_  else.

            He ducked towards an apartment building and slammed the door open with his shoulder, stumbling into black, storm-churned water. He fell in and the cold was shocking, leaching in to the bones and sapping the life out of him. He pushed himself to the surface and broke through with a gasp, coughing. A fishing boat bobbed and rocked just ahead and he swam desperately for it, but it was lifted out of the water before he could reach it.

            He floated, feeling his body turn to ice, and stared up at Gipsy Danger setting the boat a hundred yards away. A gigantic wave crashed down over Newt and forced him underwater, and he screamed reflexively, the stream of bubbles rushing up and away. Saltwater filled his mouth and he realized he was drowning; Newt thrashed, turning over in the frigid water.

            Below him Knifehead swam gracelessly, the its brilliant yellow stripes shining in the dark. In its wake Newt was pushed down further into cold, merciless pressure, and he blacked out. He woke up an instant later warm and dry, though he rolled over and coughed out lungsful of seawater. He wiped his mouth against the back of his hand and stood unsteadily, leaning against a wall for support and trying not to hyperventilate.

            “Wasn’t real,” he said. The taste of salt burned on his lips. “It wasn’t real.”

            He drew away from the wall and looked around. He was in a well-furnished living room, comfortable and peaceful. Shoving his glasses up his nose again and spitting out one last mouthful of brine, he wandered deeper into the house. Family pictures lined the walls – one that hung slightly apart from the rest caught his eye, featuring a man and woman embracing and smiling at the camera. One of the only pictures of his parents together before his mother had left. He looked past it to the other frames, smiling to see himself as a kid with his father and uncle; photos of science fairs, summer days by the lake and holidays. He felt something slip and tried to look away, half his brain screaming for him not to give into the chase again, but the other half, God, the other half-

            “I don’t think I’m good enough for MIT.”

            “You’re smart as hell, Newt. You’ll mop the floor with ‘em.”

            Newt and his uncle sat on the porch swing, looking out at the lake.

            “Yeah, I know how to take stuff apart and put it back together. Big deal,” Newt said, looking over at his uncle. The man was nursing his third beer, and the stub of a cigar smoked in the overfull ashtray at his elbow. “That doesn’t mean I’m good enough. Maybe I just…”

            “Got lucky?” Illia asked. “You sure as hell did. Especially on full scholarships. Look at you, kid. Genius needs an audience and you’re playing to the wrong crowd.”

            Newt groaned, pressing his hands to his face.

            “Don’t make music metaphors. I get that enough from Dad.”

            “Where the hell do you think he gets it from?”

            Newt didn’t uncover his face, instead pressing the heels of his palms against his eyes. They started to hurt, a sharp, thudding pain blooming behind his left eye.

            “Don’t chase it,” he whispered to himself, voice strangled. “Don’t chase it. Wake up, wake up,  _wake up-!”_

He jerked back and hit his head against the back of the porch swing with a sharp crack. The pain faded instantly and he found himself alone, and he jumped off the swing like it was a bed of hot coals.

            “You idiot,” he hissed. “You stupid, nostalgic idiot.”

            The lake and house didn’t fade, though he was willing it to. The same creaky boards on the steps, the same tree in the front yard where he’d carved his initials when he was ten. He abandoned the house and walked down towards the lake, though he couldn’t resist reaching up to brush a low-hanging branch. The leaves felt real against his fingertips, and the urge to fall back into memory almost overwhelmed him. He stuffed his hands hurriedly back into his pockets.

            The bright summer afternoon had faded to nightfall by the time he reached the lake’s shore, a five-minute walk in the real world. He looked up again and the sky was still shattered. He searched for familiar stars and realized all he could see were shards of the Anteverse’s sky, violently burning red stars and dense veils of gas.

The air smelled like acrid smoke and he turned around to see Cherno Alpha wading through a burning city behind the lake house, Fiend biting at its smokestack-like head and trying to rip it off. Cherno spun around and rammed its fists into the kaiju’s gut again and again, and luminous blood spewed from its mouth in a poisonous fountain.

Newt watched Cherno pick Fiend up and lift it into the air, and he found himself bracing as the kaiju was thrown violently to the ground. It landed badly on its head and its neck snapped with a thunderous crack, though it still gasped and writhed in agony. He turned away and ignored the sound of Cherno’s fists crushing Fiend’s head to a pulp, walking towards the lake’s shore and the old wooden dock he had used to fish on.

The lake was secluded up in the mountains, and on either side of the shore green hills sloped to make a tiny valley, isolated from the rest of the world. There was no place safer, even now. Inland, far above sea level…the last time he’d been there was the summer before he went to MIT and the permanent move to Boston. He stepped to the edge of the dock and looked down. Waves beat against the wooden poles, and the air was thick with the smell of salt.

Newt blinked and rubbed at his eyes, but the world didn’t change. The Pacific Ocean lapped at the edges of what had been a lake’s shores, stretching out into the far distance. He looked at the sky and the Anteverse’s stars burned like beacons. This place felt different- a fixed point in the churning streams of memories he wandered through. Looking back again he saw Cherno Alpha repeating its battle with Fiend, a violent, unending dance.

Waves thudded against the dock and made it shift under Newt’s feet. He looked out towards the water and saw a stripe of light flickering on the waves right in front of him, a massive, jagged hole that burned on the ocean floor.

The Breach.

Newt stared at it until its light seared his vision. The shape of the fissure was unmistakable, a crack in the world that spewed monsters. He knelt down and touched the water’s surface with his fingertips and the waves stilled. He looked behind him again and land was gone, and he realized he was stranded on the dock. The Pacific stretched out in all directions, the broken sky bordering every horizon. The Breach shone beneath and the light was blinding. Newt backed up and stood in the middle of the dock, considering his options. He could wait it out here until he went crazy – not very appealing. Or he could jump in.  _Also_  not very appealing.

Something nudged the dock and sent him flying forward, and he caught himself hard on his hands and knees. He looked around and the water was teeming with dark, massive shapes, flashes of claws and teeth skimming the surface.

“Oh, come  _on!”_ he snapped. “You’re really doing this? Seriously?”

The dock rocked again and something growled threateningly beneath him. Poisonous yellow eyes stared at Newt through cracks in the wooden slats.

“You brought me here,” he said. “I’m just along for the ride.”

The eyes blinked and vanished. Newt paced the dock from end to end, and the water grew more violent, churning as kaiju prowled just beneath the surface. An idea slowly dawned on him and he paused mid-step.

“You don’t want me here,” he said, looking around. “There’s something here you don’t want me to see.”

He looked towards the Breach again. The light shone like a beacon in the dark, broken by the shapes of kaiju swimming around it. Just like the final assault- guarding it against human intrusion. A rebellious spark flared in Newt and he slowly took off his glasses, stowing them in a side pocket.

“You don’t want me going down there,  _do_ you.”

He backed up to the end of the dock and knelt down like a sprinter getting ready for a race. The dock shook violently and something massive, something  _terrible_ , broke through the water and towered above him. All around him kaiju exploded out from the water, and Newt took off running. The dock was torn away piece by piece behind him and one of the kaiju shrieked in dismay as he reached the end, jumping into the water.

The Breach was a blinding stripe right below him and he sank towards it. He could feel the inexorable pull of it catch him, and Newt let it drag him down, and inside.

Far above him, the kaiju roared in rage.

 

 


	17. Chapter 17

17.

 

Everything hurt. Newt rolled onto his side and tried not to curl up into a ball, pressing his hands against his face and willing the crippling pain behind his left eye to go away. He hadn’t been in this much pain since… well, before Scunner had hijacked his mind and thrown him into the Drift.

“ _Brilliant_  idea, Newton,” he muttered, trying to force his eyes open. “Let’s run headlong into the Breach and see what happens. You’re a genius.”

Built from memory or not, the Anteverse simply wasn’t made for human perception. Everything was blurry and split into afterimages; Newt looked at his hands and saw three translucent, ghosting versions of them over the real ones. He rubbed at his eyes, the icy, sharp pain behind the left one driving him to distraction.

“Ohhh, I made a mistake,” he groaned. Maybe the kaiju hadn’t been guarding this part of the Drift from him; maybe they had been keeping him out for his own good. He certainly hadn’t been able to do that on his own lately. He took a deep breath and willed himself to sit up, opening his eyes and looking around again.

Something twelve feet tall with too many eyes and built like an enormous, slimy insect was towering right beside him, clicking hands that looked more like pincers.

“ _SHIT!”_

Newt had rolled to his feet and promptly fallen down again in a panic before he even realized what he was doing, skidding across the slick ground in an attempt to flee. The thing didn’t react to him at all, merely standing and twitching its deadly-looking hands. Its head kept cricking to one side in a disturbing, repetitive twitch. Newt stared at it and realized he recognized it; he had watched it – well, dozens of things  _like_  it – putting kaiju together.

“You are a scary son of a bitch,” he said to the alien. “The twitch isn’t helping.”

The alien cricked its head again, and its pincers flexed open and closed. Shiny, gossamer membranes of wings hung like drapes of fabric between its thin arms, unexpectedly beautiful on something that looked like a nightmarish mix of insect and crustacean. Newt walked around it in a full circle, taking in the sight.

“Jesus, I’m looking at an alien.”

The kaiju were monstrous, but they all had something strangely familiar about them; Raiju’s crocodile-like face, Karloff’s spindly, humanoid body. But this thing…this thing felt genuinely extraterrestrial, discomforting and frightening to look at. The kaiju were the war hounds, but  _these_  things had been holding the leashes. Newt gave into childish impulse and kicked the alien in one of its spiny legs. It was a disappointment when he phased through it without hurting it.

“I can think of twelve different people who’d love to punch you in the face,” he said to it sourly. Its head cricked again. Abandoning the alien, Newt took a few experimental steps forward. The pain was starting to recede and he was getting used to the afterimages, but trying to focus on things was still dizzying. He pushed his glasses up his nose again –when had he taken them out of his pocket? – and walked on.

Other aliens were scattered all around him, every one of them staring out into the distance. He had wound up on some kind of open platform built of a strange material that seemed almost organic and chitinous. Support beams that looked like giant spinal columns bridged the platforms together, and Newt noticed more aliens skittering up and down them in ant-like lines. It made his skin crawl to watch them move and he had to look away.

“Stupid, stupid idea,” he muttered. “Should’ve stayed on the dock.”

He weaved around the stationary aliens, ignoring their disturbing twitches and thin, squealing voices as best he could. On the bright side, at least they weren’t real and so weren’t trying to kill him or experiment on him.

Thinking on it now, he couldn’t help but wonder what Otachi would have done if it had caught him the night it and Leatherback had spewed out of the Breach. Hannibal Chau had definitely been right; it had been looking for him. Maybe it would have just killed him out of hand if it had caught him. He couldn’t think of a way the kaiju could have captured him and brought him back with it through the Breach – outside of eating him and then maybe throwing him up at the feet of its overlords, anyway.

Wandering on autopilot, Newt didn’t even realize where he was until he walked directly through one of the aliens. He still couldn’t get used to phasing through people like a ghost; it made him question why he wasn’t just falling endlessly through the landscape since none of it was real, and that was a bunch of theoretic crap he couldn’t muster any patience for. Brushing himself off reflexively, shuddering at the thought of touching one of the aliens, Newt looked up and stopped dead.

Row upon row of massive incubation pods were lined in front of him, stretching from one blurry horizon to the next. Kaiju in various states of completion were encased in every single one; some were thrashing and roaring, struggling to get free. But some – and Newt found himself nauseated at the sight – were in the active process of being put together, alive and aware from the very first seconds their construction began.

A skinless kaiju screamed voicelessly and convulsed as aliens pieced it together. Newt watched the muscle tissue of its face and throat strain with the effort of its struggling, lidless eyes rolling madly in their sockets. It was horrifying. Kaiju felt pain like any other living thing; he’d watched enough Jaeger missions to know just how much they could endure before dying. But it was the sheer indifference the aliens showed to their own creations that repulsed him.

 _They_  were the monsters, Newt realized, a chill shuddering through him. Genuine, soulless monsters. Indifferent to the suffering they caused, so sure of their own superiority that they could simply take whatever they wanted and no one would be able to resist them. The kaiju had no choice but to obey, and who even knew how many other worlds they had swept through like a plague? No wonder the aliens had tried so hard to take Earth. It was something they wanted, and the vermin infesting their claim had dared to struggle against them.

The half-finished kaiju found its voice as the aliens began sheathing thick, armored hide over its body, and its shrieks were piercing and agonized. The aliens swarmed over it and it grew complacent as they finished weaving it together, and when they cleared off it and moved onto another pod Newt found himself staring straight at Scissure. It was weirdly honoring to see it - it had been Scissure’s attack on Sydney that had lead to the Jaeger program’s development.

“You kind of helped us save the world,” he said to it. “Kind of.”

He was glad the kaiju didn’t reply; Scunner’s insistent muttering in the back of his head was bad enough. He didn’t like that it had been quiet for so long, even though he didn’t miss its intrusive presence. Scunner being quiet could only mean it was up to something and Newt didn’t even want to think of what it could be doing. Bad enough he’d been ousted from his own body – having Scunner’s mind replace his like a goddamned pod person was even worse.

He walked away from the incubation lines, wandering for hours- or maybe only for a few minutes. Not being able to perceive the passage of time was getting to be a gigantic metaphysical pain in the neck, but there wasn’t much Newt could do about it. So he kept walking, sometimes climbing up to new platforms, and always avoiding touching the scattered aliens. He knew a lot of people would have given a lot to see what he was seeing now: another universe, an entirely new species – even if they were complete bastards - but the loneliness was starting to get to him. Newt found himself sympathizing with Scunner, if only just a little bit. Being entirely alone was a terrible thing.

            He walked along the edge of the platform, looking down into the abyss. Stars burned like dark red embers, and clouds of orange and yellow gas striped across the stark black sky. It would be easy, terribly easy, to take a step forward and let himself fall. It wouldn’t kill him; nothing here could. But he would fall. Maybe he’d crash right through the bottom of the pit and find himself in another memory.

            Maybe he’d find himself in his own memories. Maybe he’d find himself home again.

            Newt crept closer to the lip of the platform. He was tired, scared, and lonely. He wanted to go home. He wanted to wake up and find himself in his quarters in the Shatterdome, or in his old apartment in Boston. He wanted to wake up and find himself surrounded by real people, not shades of memories.

            It would be so easy to fall.

            Newt took a deep breath and stepped back from the edge, shaking his head. This place was probably going to drive him crazy, but he wouldn’t try and speed the process along. Shivering at the realization of what he’d almost done, he turned and started walking as fast as he could across the platform. He didn’t bother avoiding the aliens, phasing through them like smoke.

Walking turned to running, and running turned to sprinting. He jumped onto one of the bridging columns and ran up it, pushing through the awful marching lines of aliens skittering up and down it alongside him. They were everywhere, swarming together like locusts. He realized that under his revulsion for them, Newt hated them. Hated them for the war they had started, the damage they had inflicted, all the pointless death – every single death that their callousness had caused. Pentecost. Chuck Hansen. Yancy Becket. The Wei Tangs. The Kaidonovskys. Mako’s mother and father.

And most unexpected of all, seen only as the monsters they had been forced to be, the kaiju. They hadn’t asked to be made. It seemed they had been born only to suffer.

Newt staggered to a halt, bracing his hands on his knees as he tried to catch his breath. He had to sit down after a minute, wiping sweat off his face and wincing as it stung his eyes.

“Shit,” he muttered. “Shit, shit,  _shit.”_

He recovered quickly – he hadn’t really been running at all, had he? – and stood. He’d flung himself deep into the aliens’ constructs and gotten lost; a huge tower stood in front of him, climbing up for miles into the fiery sky.

What the hell. Not like he had anywhere else to go.

Newt walked through the tower’s massive open gateway and found himself in pitch blackness. It was a relief to be out of the harsh red light and away from the scuttling crowds, and he let himself wander in the dark for awhile. It was strange that he could still see himself despite the lightless environment, but he didn’t bother to question it.

It was a long time before Newt stopped walking. He looked around and there was nothingness in every direction, but if he strained his ears he thought he could hear something. A faint, rhythmic pounding, like a heartbeat. He put a hand to his chest in confusion. No, it wasn’t his. The rhythm grew louder the longer he focused on it, and he realized it was a crashing wave of beats, a hundred poundings one after the other in quick succession.

Newt looked around and realized the dark wasn’t so complete anymore. Something enormous and faintly outlined in grey, flat light was surrounding him.

“Oh, shit,” he whispered.

The heartbeats crashed around him, and hundreds of eyes opened.

“Oh, shit. Oh my God. I am so  _stupid._ ”

How could he have thought he was alone? How could he actually have forgotten there was more than Scunner’s mind to wander through? The kaiju were a hivemind. Multiple intelligences, condensed and trapped in a single mind rather than spread through the natural network. The eyes stared at him, half-hostile, half-curious, and very, very aware of him.

Newt had wandered straight into the core of the hivemind.

He steeled himself, cleared his throat, and willed himself to not run in the other direction screaming.

“Uh…hi, everyone.”

 

 


	18. Chapter 18

18.

 

“I cannot even  _begin_ to tell you how sick I am getting of this.”

Gottlieb sat silently in the lab, resting his cane across his knees and refusing to look up, preferring to stare at his hands. They were heavily bandaged, and two of the gouges Scunner had ripped into him had needed stitches. Herc stopped pacing and stood in front of him.

“Look at me when I’m speaking, Doctor,” he said. Gottlieb glanced up at Herc and couldn’t stop a wince at the infuriated expression he found staring back at him.

“I am not appreciating the level of insubordination you’ve been showing,” Herc said icily. “When I give an order, I expect it to be followed. I was not giving you  _suggestions._ ”

“I know-”

“ _Shut up_. You talk when I  _tell you_  you can.”

Gottlieb’s mouth snapped shut at once. He had never seen the Marshall so angry before; exhaustion and stress were fueling it, but Gottlieb knew he had brought the axe down on his own head.

“I don’t want your explanations,” Herc said, voice menacingly quiet. “I don’t want your reasons, or your theories, or your self-important assumptions that you can flaunt  _my authority_  to do what  _you want._  If you ever disobey a direct order again, you will be removed from your position and this facility so fast your head will spin.”

Gottlieb flinched but forced himself to be silent, though a dozen different protests were straining to come out. Herc watched him as though daring him to argue.

“I have too much to deal with right now, Doctor Gottlieb,” he continued. “I don’t need my own people giving me more trouble.”

Gottlieb nodded slightly, biting his tongue. Herc watched him a second longer and then sighed, rubbing tiredly at his eyes. He’d forgotten to shave and he was wearing yesterday’s clothes; if he had slept at all since Scunner’s arrival, Gottlieb couldn’t tell. He seemed to have aged ten years in the space of two days.

“What?” Herc asked, and Gottlieb dropped his gaze quickly to the floor, saying nothing. Herc sighed again. “You can talk now, Hermann.”

“Nothing, sir,” Gottlieb said, studying a crack in the cement. “I…apologize.”

“I’m not looking for apologies either,” Herc replied sourly. “I want to know that I can  _trust_  you. Believe it or not, I actually am the commanding officer here.”

“I know that, sir.”

“I don’t think you do. You act as though I’m a stand-in until Marshall Pentecost walks in again and lets you do what you want. The war’s over, Hermann. We can’t keep operating as though the world’s ending and anything goes.”

Gottlieb flinched again, looking everywhere but the Marshall. Herc scowled, pulling the chair from Newt’s desk and sitting in front of him.

“What did that thing say to you?” he asked. Gottlieb shook his head. “Don’t make me order you to tell me _._  I’m not in the mood to be despotic.”

“It’s nothing that bears repeating,” Gottlieb said, looking up at him. “Threats and posturing from a frightened animal, nothing more.”

Herc pinned him down with a gimlet stare, and he fidgeted uncomfortably with his cane. Talking down a monster was one thing. Avoiding Herc’s questions was an entirely different brand of frightening.

“Doctor Gottlieb,” Herc said quietly. “What did it say?”

“There is no solid reason to believe it,” Gottlieb said.

“We don’t have a grasp on what impossibility truly is. Logic can be stretched,” Herc retorted. “Didn’t you say so?”

Gottlieb cringed to have his words thrown back in his face. Sighing heavily, he leaned forward and twisted his cane between his hands, ignoring the twinges of pain in his abused fingers.

“It said that war is coming,” he said. “That what we have experienced this past decade was nothing more than a cleansing of the land for its masters. That…that we have not yet experienced the true war those creatures are capable of waging.”

“Do you believe it?”

“I don’t know,” Gottlieb said. “It was angry. Maybe it was just trying to frighten me. I don’t…I truly don’t know.”

“It  _did_  scare you,” Herc said. “You believe it.”

Gottlieb looked up at him. Herc’s eyes were deeply shadowed, and there was a hint of despair in his expression. With a slight shock Gottlieb realized Herc was as afraid as he was.

“I do,” Gottlieb admitted, so quietly he could barely hear himself speak. “I think all we have done is buy ourselves a reprieve from their masters’ attentions. I think the worst is yet to come.”

Herc closed his eyes and hung his head, and Gottlieb felt a jab of unexpected pity for him. The weight of it all seemed to bend Herc’s back until he couldn’t even hold himself up, and he pressed his hands wearily to his face.

“You stupid son of a bitch, why’d you have to go and talk to it?” he asked, voice muffled by his hands. They dropped away a moment later and he glared at Gottlieb, frustration boiling up uncontrollably. “Are you saying that after everything we did, everything we lost, it was for  _nothing?_ ”

“I am not saying that,” Gottlieb said quickly. “This is an opportunity to rebuild our ranks, improve the Jaeger program-”

“For what? What’s going to come pouring out the next Breach?” Herc was standing now, his voice echoing loudly through the lab. “That thing was playing you for a fool!”

“Do not get angry with me for giving you the message,” Gottlieb said sharply, slamming his cane down on the floor and standing unsteadily. His bad leg protested agonizingly under his weight but he ignored it, hobbling a step towards Herc. “Gipsy Danger’s payload was far less potent than the bomb we lost during the assault. It is perfectly sound to think there are remnants that have not been destroyed!”

“So it was all worthless, then! You’re saying that there was no purpose to Stacker  _killing my son!_ ”

Gottlieb stared wide-eyed at Herc. The Marshall had gone deadly pale, startled at the rage that had exploded out of him. He sat back down heavily and his expression was shuttered.

“That was…inappropriate of me,” he said. “Excuse me, Doctor Gottlieb.”

Deeply uncomfortable silence fell. Gottlieb eased himself back down into his chair, picking his cane up again and awkwardly polishing a scuff off the head with his sleeve. When he glanced up at the Marshall again he had stood up, walking over to Newt’s desk and sifting aimlessly through the piles of disorganized notes and reports.

“I am not saying that the sacrifices we have made were in vain,” Gottlieb said carefully. “It would be an insult to the memory of anyone who has died in combat against the kaiju to say such a thing. What I am saying is that we have been given  _time._ ”

“Time to do what?”

“To shore up our defenses against the storm that is coming,” Gottlieb said, pushing himself up and limping over to the desk. “To prepare. To ready our people, our  _world,_  against what is left of our enemy.”

“Why do they hate us so much?” Herc asked, turning to look at the line of specimen tanks. He sounded strained to the point of breaking, and Gottlieb was awkwardly grateful that the Marshall trusted him enough to let his distant façade slip, if only for these few painful moments.

“Because we refused to let them take what they wanted,” he said. “They laid claim to our world because they found it first. We were the invaders in their eyes.”

Herc shook his head in disgust, rubbing at his eyes again as though trying to drive back a headache.

“You saw them, didn’t you. When you and Newt…”

“I did,” Gottlieb said. The memory made him shiver. “They were terrible things.”

“They’re advanced enough to create things like the Breach, you’d think they would’ve figured out by now how to sustain themselves,” Herc muttered bitterly.

“Perhaps their advancement is exactly why they act like locusts,” Gottlieb said, sitting on the edge of Newt’s desk. “Capable of incredible things and using up everything they have in the process. The amount of energy that sustained the Breach was immeasurable.”

            “So who even knows what they were burning through to keep it open,” Herc said. “Or what they did to open it to begin with. Suppose it’s too optimistic to think it’d stay closed forever.”

            “There was victory in sealing the Breach, Marshall,” Gottlieb said quietly. “We forced it shut and locked it against them. But there are still wolves at the door.”

            Herc picked up one of Newt’s report files, flicking through half-finished paperwork. His handwriting was a jittery scrawl; sentences and ideas running together in an almost undecipherable mess.

            “Was there anything human in him?”

            Gottlieb stared at his bandaged hands, flexing stiffened fingers.

            “No. You were right. Newton wasn’t there.”

            “He stopped Scunner from attacking Mako. Shouted it down.”

            “I know.”

            Gottlieb hated the unguarded misery in his voice, but he didn’t have the energy to hide it. Herc didn’t comment on it, and for that at least he was grateful.

            “I don’t think this is going to end well for him,” he said eventually, picking at his bandages. “When that creature dies, I am afraid it is going to take him with it…or damage him so irreparably it might as well have.”

            “Maybe,” Herc said. Gottlieb gave him a wry look. “Ah…sorry.”

            “Your bedside manner needs some work, sir.”

            Herc laughed unexpectedly, though it was a brief, tired sound. He gave Gottlieb a long look, then put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed.

            “It may work out,” he said. “Try not to forget what we talked about before I started shouting at you, alright?”

            Gottlieb saluted him without irony, though he smiled slightly.

            “Yes sir.”

            Herc nodded once and left, shoulders squared with resignation to the burden weighing him down. He looked no less tired but there was a hard resolve in his face that hadn’t been there before, and Gottlieb was heartened to see it. If the Marshall refused to break, he saw no reason why he should. Raleigh had been right. There was no other choice but to bear it.

            For now, at least, he thought that he could.


	19. Chapter 19

19.

 

            Tendo had only gotten three hours’ sleep when the vid-call console rang. He rolled over and off his bed at once, hands moving blindly to activate the console before he was even awake. His words slurred together as his brain dragged itself into consciousness again.

            “Y’sshir. M’comin’.”

            “ _You haven’t been returning my calls, Officer Choi.”_

Tendo blinked hard a couple times, making a sour face and resisting the urge to cut the call.

            “Do you even…d’you even  _know_  what time it is?”

            “ _It’s eleven thirty in the morning.”_

“Yeah. And for someone who’s been up for nineteen hours that means it’s like…three in the morning. What do you want?”

            “ _A little consideration would be nice. I’m waiting.”_

            Tendo worked his jaw in annoyance. The vid-call screen was scrambled with static and jumping bars of color that hurt his eyes, and the distorted voice grated on his ears.

            “Well, you’re just gonna have to keep waiting until I get at least another six hours sleep.  _Bye._ ”

            He hung up, falling back onto his bed and dragging the scratchy blankets up and over his head. Immediately someone was pounding forcefully on his door, the echoes ringing through his quarters until the racket was unbearable. With a choked roar of extreme annoyance, he got up, threw the blankets off and wrenched the door open.

            A woman with a shaved head in Hollywood sunglasses and a long, fur-lined leather jacket stood in the hall, smoking a cigarette and regarding him with a tiny, smug smile. Tendo stared at her, then stuck his head out the door and looked down both ends of the corridor.

            “This is a  _secure facility_ ,” he said incredulously. “How the hell did you even get  _in_  here?”

            The woman leaned against the doorframe and Tendo recoiled from her, nose wrinkling at the smoke. She smiled again and blew a cloud of it in his face.

            “There are people here who still recall business arrangements and treat them with the respect they deserve,” she said. Tendo glared at her, his disheveled and overtired reflection staring back at him in the oversized sunglasses. “I’ve tried to contact you several times. You keep directing me to voicemail.”

            “That’s because I’ve been ignoring you,” Tendo said sweetly. “I was hoping you could take a hint.”

            The woman took another drag on her cigarette, snapping the smoke. For all that he disliked anything and anyone tied to Hannibal Chau and his black market network, Tendo couldn’t help but admire the woman’s poise. She worked for a lowlife and her arrogance was constantly galling, but he wouldn’t be human if he couldn’t appreciate the curves accentuated by that tight coat and how the silky fur collar circled her face like a mane. She never gave her real name, and Tendo had long since learned to stop asking. But there was a time when he'd been younger, dumber and meaner that he would have endured her arrogance and coldness just for an opportunity to get closer; she was beautiful.

She caught him staring with something less than intense dislike and she smiled again, taking a step closer to him. He cleared his throat awkwardly and looked away.

            “We’ve had a very steady trade agreement between my associates and yours for years now,” she said, dropping the cigarette and twisting it under her heel. “It’s bad business to ignore rightful claims, Officer Choi. It causes problems.”

            “Scavenging kaiju scraps to feed your customers isn’t a priority focus for us right now,” he said. “You don’t know the first thing about what real problems are.”

            “I have an inkling,” the woman said. “I’d say the foremost of yours is outside right now poisoning seagulls and stinking up the coastline.”

            Tendo sighed, rubbing his face roughly and wishing to crawl back into bed.

            “There’s two cat-four corpses festering downtown right now,” he said sourly. “You’re not gonna stand there and tell me you haven’t picked Leatherback and Otachi clean.”

            “Leatherback was reduced to sludge by a plasma cannon,” the woman said. “Most of it is unviable for sale. And Otachi…”

            She shrugged slightly. Tendo made a rude noise, nodding in false sympathy.

            “Right, right. I heard a couple reports about your boss being  _eaten_.”

            The woman’s lips pursed tightly and she glared at him over the rims of her sunglasses.

            “Mister Chau had an accident on the field,” she retorted. “I represent his  _active interests_  while he recovers.”

            “Well, that’s just too damn bad, isn’t it?” Tendo said. “Scunner isn’t up for grabs.”

            “Marshall Pentecost was clear in the terms-”

            “And he’s also  _gone_ , God rest him,” Tendo interrupted. “Scunner’s remains are going to a PPDC facility. And since your boss never actually signed anything physical about the deal, well...that’s really just the  _shits_ , ain’t it?”

            The woman stared at him in stony silence, then dug into her jacket pocket and lit another cigarette. Where she had even gotten them from was a mystery; real tobacco was almost impossible to come by, even in a port city. She offered him one and he shook his head.

            “Cancer sticks aren’t much for bribery.”

            “Kaiju bile attacks cancer cells. People on their deathbeds have made full recoveries after using Mister Chau’s remedies. You’re cutting off access to vital medicines.”

            “That is such a crock of shit and you know it,” Tendo spat. “Look. I’m sorry your supply line’s dried up, but I can’t go over anyone’s heads about the decision. And if you complain to him about it Marshall Hansen is just gonna boot you out on your ass. So why don’t you take yourself and your coat and  _go home._ ”

            “I am not going to be talked down to by a man wearing sheep-patterned pajamas.”

            Tendo felt his face burn like a lit match as he looked down at himself. Shit. He  _was_  wearing his sheepie PJ pants. At least the Los Angeles Angels t-shirt was saving a scrap of dignity for him.

            “I…I. Uh.”

            “Perhaps you could get dressed so we could talk like  _adults,_ ” she said, so sweetly Tendo wanted to shrink. He cleared his throat again, closing the door in her face and changing into something moderately clean. He was tying on a bowtie when she invited herself in, and he whirled around in dismay. She grinned a little, giving him a long once-over.

            “Still dressing like a rockabilly, I see.”

            “Ohhh, no. No, you are absolutely  _not_. You slammed the PJs but that’s the only jab you get.  _Out._ ”

            The woman turned on her heel and closed the door quietly behind her, and Tendo grumbled as he fixed his suspenders vehemently over his shoulders. The woman was on her third cigarette and a mischievously spiteful smile still played on her face as Tendo emerged, combing his hair back as best he could. He gave her an incredibly dirty look.

            “You done?” he asked. She blew a smoke ring at him, walking alongside him in confident strides.

            “You would look better in a suit, I think. I know a man in Qingdao. He could probably salvage something for you. You’d cut a striking figure.”

            “Is this what being flirted at by a reptile feels like?” Tendo said, stopping and turning to look at her. “Do cobras do this with mice before they eat them?”

            The woman ran a finger along the line of Tendo’s jaw, smiling when it clenched and at his flustered expression. She drew her sunglasses off and looked at him.

            “The first time we met, you liked me,” she said. Tendo drew away from her and shook his head like he was trying to clear it.

            “Yeah, well. Young and stupid. I thought you were something other than Hannibal Chau’s errand girl.”

            With a smoky sigh, the woman replaced her sunglasses.

            “It’s only business.”

            “It’s preying on people,” Tendo said coldly. “Lying to them and sucking them dry for everything they’ve got.”

            “No one forces them to seek us out,” the woman replied evenly. “It’s a cruel world. Looking for something to take the edge off or make it seem a little brighter isn’t a crime.”

            “You’re a pack of war profiteers.”

            “If you’re going to play semantics, isn’t  _opportunist_  a better term?”

            Tendo sighed and shook his head again, rubbing at his eyes and willing the exhaustion-fueled irritation to go away.

            “I’m going to escort you out. And I don’t want you coming back.”

            The woman regarded him silently for a moment, tapping ash onto the floor.

            “We might just come by boat and take what we need.”

            “And we might just shoot you out of the water.”

            “You’re very adamant about defending this beast’s dignity, aren’t you?” she asked dryly.

            “Just protecting investments,” Tendo retorted bitterly. “I’m sure you understand that.”

            The woman studied him for a long moment, and some of the cool arrogance faded from her.

            “You know something, don’t you?”

            Tendo blinked. He couldn’t tell if she was trying to weasel information out of him or not, and his baffled silence made her snap the sunglasses off again, studying him.

            “You  _know_  something.”

            “I’m not at liberty to discuss anything,” he said, carefully monotone. The woman’s eyes widened and she took a hard drag on her cigarette.

            “Are there more? The Breach, is…is it still  _open?_ ”

            “I’m not at liberty to discuss anything.”

            They stood staring at each other in a standoff, and Tendo broke the silence first.

            “What’s it going to take to get you to leave?”

            “Let me go look at it.”

 

 

 

 

            The stench was incredible. Tendo clamped a hand over his nose and stared at Scunner with watering eyes, trying to ignore the taste of bile flooding his mouth. The kaiju looked as awful as it smelled, blistered skin coated in a layer of grit and dried salt and spackled with seagull droppings. It breathed in spurts, lungs drawing in bubbling breaths and exhaling in hot gales through its broken mouth.

            The woman ignored the stench and walked straight up to it, standing at the edge of the hastily erected perimeter fencing meant to warn the curious away. It seemed unnecessary; if Scunner wanted to it could simply reach out and swipe the fencing away and eat whoever was coming to gawk at it. At least, it could if it was moving at all.

            “It must have been beautiful when it first came through the Breach,” the woman said, adjusting her sunglasses against the sunlight glaring off the ocean. Tendo grunted, certain that if he opened his mouth to talk he was going to throw up instead. She took one look at him and laughed, pulling a tiny jar of ointment out of her pocket and throwing it to him.

            “Put it under your nose, like a mortician. It kills the stink.”

            “What is it?”

            “Tiger balm. You’ll thank me.”

            Tendo swiped globs of the ointment under his nose, ignoring the fierce burn and grateful he could take a breath without wanting to throw up.

            “Are you going to thank me?”

            “No.”

            The woman clucked her tongue, turning back to Scunner. The kaiju stared balefully at the Shatterdome bay doors with filmy eyes and ignored them completely. A thick rope of bloody spit hung from its jaw and pooled on the broken concrete, staining it vivid blue.

            “It got caught in a nuke detonation,” Tendo said. “It dragged itself up here and it hasn’t moved since.”

            “Why did it come here?”

            “I’m not at liberty to say.”

            The woman gave him a sardonic look that he returned, shrugging.

            “So. You’ve seen it. And honestly…you wouldn’t want anything it’s got. It’s a wreck.”

            “It’s dying.”

            “Yeah. So like I said-”

            “No. You don’t understand,” the woman said, pointing at Scunner. “It’s  _dying._  You see how its flesh is mortifying in the water? That’s where the smell is coming from.”

            “How do you know?”

            “It’s my business to know,” the woman said. “Telling the good parts from the bad, what has worth and what’s useless. This thing is  _dying_. It won’t live through the night.”

            Tendo felt a sudden cold knot seize up in his chest, and the dread of it showed on his face before he could hide it. The woman studied him again, and she nodded.

            “You  _do_  know something. It wouldn’t happen to involve that twitchy little scientist Pentecost sent to us a few weeks ago…would it?”

            She smiled humorlessly at the look on Tendo’s face, lighting another cigarette. “He was awfully proud of his Drift experiment. He was so excited about everything; he could barely contain himself. I hope it hasn’t  _backfired_  on him.”

            “It’s time for you to leave,” Tendo said tightly. The woman blew a cloud of smoke towards Scunner, watching the bloody spit drip from its jaws.

            “Poor man. He seemed cleverer than this.”

            “I said,  _leave._ ”

            The woman eyed him with jaded amusement, patting his cheek.

            “What’s one more loss in this war, Tendo?” she asked. “So much has been lost already. Does another death really hurt that much?”

            “ _Out._ ”

            The woman sighed and walked off, flicking her cigarette away. Tendo stayed outside long after she had gone and stared at Scunner. The blood oozing from its mouth had begun to drip into the water, and it glowed on the waves in cancerous foam.

 

 

 

 

 

 


	20. Chapter 20

20.

 

 

            None of the eyes blinked. Newt couldn’t count how many were staring down at him, and no matter where he looked there was another pair watching. He was completely surrounded by the formless mass of the hivemind.

            “Well!” he said, voice cheerful to the point of hysteria. “I’ve  _obviously_  come to the wrong part of the Drift, so I’m just…going to leave? Yeah, I’m going to leave, and we’re going to pretend this didn’t happen. So…yeah! Nice to see you. Gotta get going now.”

            He walked backwards a few steps and bumped into an arm limned in grey light. The arm shifted and pushed him forward again, and Newt bit his tongue against a startled squeak. The formlessness of the hive shifted and he could see Onibaba’s crablike face turning towards him, leaning down to investigate. It rippled and changed into Otachi, and its mouth opened wide.

            “Oh c’mon  _not the tongue again-”_

The tongue looped around Newt and he froze, praying it didn’t touch him. Its tip bloomed and glowed with that same strange, flat light, and it swept over him like a snake’s, testing the air. It seemed satisfied after a moment and the tongue receded, twisting back into Otachi’s mouth.

            “This really isn’t  _necessary_ I mean you already know who I am, so really this is just you trying to screw around with me at this point and I’m _really_ not appreciating it,” Newt said frantically, ducking away from Otachi as it craned its head down towards him. It butted its snout slightly against him, knocking him down to the ground.

            “Oh shit oh shit oh shit-”

            Otachi nudged him again and sent him rolling, and all Newt could think of was a cat playing with its food. He curled up into a ball reflexively, throwing his arms over his head.

            “Shit shit  _shit shit shit-!”_

Above him, he could hear the kaiju growling with unmistakable curiosity. It stopped after a moment and Newt dared to look up. Otachi had changed to Mutavore, and it clicked its teeth at him.

            “Is this  _funny_  to you?” Newt shouted, pushing himself up and brushing himself off. His glasses had been knocked askew and he fixed them furiously, smashing the frames against his face. “I’m not a  _toy_ , okay?”

            Mutavore lay down in front of him, its pointed chin resting awkwardly on its forearms as it stared at him. The grey light had grown beyond its original faint outlining, giving the hivemind’s mass a ghostly, smoky appearance. It watched him with tired, intelligent eyes, its claws flexing as he drew closer.

            “You’re…” Newt said, voice dropping to a murmur. “You really are something. Look at you.”

            The kaiju’s claws continued to rake restlessly at the insubstantial ground, though there was no obvious threat in it. Newt passed between its massive paws, straight up to its face. He could feel the heat of its breath blow across his face, smelling faintly of ammonia.

            “You scared a lot of people,” he said to it. “I was watching the news after what you did in Sydney. Probably doesn’t mean much to you though, does it?”

            Mutavore didn’t react, only moving its head to one side so it could watch him closer. Licking his lips nervously, Newt hesitantly raised his hand and reached out. His fingertips brushed against the kaiju’s face, feeling fever-hot skin and smooth, hard bone. When the kaiju didn’t react, he pressed his palm against it, fingers splaying.

            “Look at you,” he repeated, voice barely a whisper. “Just _look_  at you.”

            The kaiju allowed his touch for a moment longer, then pulled its head away and shook itself. Newt realized he was smiling like an idiot as he watched it stand and circle around him, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop. It was such a relief, just for a moment, to not be afraid. Mutavore flowed seamlessly into Yamarashi as it walked, and a startled laugh escaped him.

            “Wait, wait wait! Look, look at this!” he called eagerly, yanking up his sleeve to reveal his tattoo. The kaiju’s heavy head swung towards him, blinking slowly. “I…I know. It’s kind of weird. But I watched you when you were…when you were tearing through Los Angeles. Everyone around me was _terrified_  of you.”

            He looked from his tattoo to the shade towering above him and shook his head.

            “All I could think of was how incredible you were,” he said. “A lot of people started avoiding me after I said that out loud. Can’t say I blame them, but…”

            Yamarashi made a loud croaking noise at the back of its throat, prowling around Newt and staring down at him. It left a sweeping vaporous trail behind it, afterimages of other faces and limbs twisting in the smoke. It stopped in its tracks and its back arched up, and the croak turned into a wet, barking cough. Blood a brighter shade of grey splattered from its mouth and hung in ropes from its jaws.

            “ _Hey!_  Hey, what’s wrong?” Newt asked, startled. “Come down here, let me see you.”

            Yamarashi swung its head away and suddenly it was Knifehead that looked down at him. Its shark-like teeth were stained with bright blood, its tongue lolling. Newt stared at it and a sick chill shot up his spine.

            “You’re dying,” he said, voice cracking slightly. “You’re…shit. Shit. You’re  _dying._ Let me go. You…you’ve got to let me go.  _Please.”_

Knifehead growled and turned away from him, lumbering into the dark. Newt followed, jogging to keep up.

            “Hey.  _Hey!_ I get it, okay? You don’t want to be alone. But you…I don’t want to  _die_  with you, okay? Don’t do this to me.”

            Knifehead paused midstride and coughed again, a shudder rippling through it from head to tail. Newt ran in front of it, trying to catch its eye. He wasn’t quite sure, but he could have sworn it was avoiding looking at him.

            “ _Hey!”_

The kaiju looked down, and it began to growl viciously. Newt steeled himself and glared up at it, refusing to move. Knifehead’s paws slammed down on either side of him, massive claws whistling through the air as they fell. Newt staggered but caught himself, glaring up at the kaiju.

            “You don’t scare me,” he said softly. The growl stuttered and died in Knifehead’s throat. “What can you even do?”

            Teeth clicking aggressively, Knifehead stepped over him and kept walking. It coughed and shuddered, body twisting into Scunner – Scunner as it was meant to be, as it remembered itself. Unbroken, unburned, massive tusks dragging its head down towards the ground. Newt gave a growl of his own, running after it and slamming his hands against its leg, trying to get its attention.

            “ _You_  did this to me,” he shouted, furious. “Have the decency to look at me before you kill me, you son of a bitch!”

            Scunner wheeled around, raking at the ground with its tusks. It narrowly missed crushing Newt, and he fell back a few feet. Kaiju and man stared at each other angrily.

            “You did this,” Newt repeated harshly. “I didn’t want this.”

 

                                                _drift driftdriftdrift hive hive drift hive_

 

            “It’s not the same thing!” Newt shouted. “Drifting isn’t  _like_  this. I don’t  _want_  to be part of your hive!”

 

 

             _wanted it wantedwanted driftdrift                hive join see wanted    to      see_

 

            “I…yes,” Newt said, the anger draining away and leaving him empty. “I wanted to see. I wanted to be right.”

            Scunner bared its teeth in undeniable scorn, and infuriating Newt.

            “I wanted to see because I wanted to  _stop you,_ ” he said defiantly. “I wanted to slam the door shut in your faces.”

            The kaiju swept its tusks across the ground again and the tip of one slammed into Newt. It sent him flying, skidding over the invisible ground in to crumple in agonized shock. The pain faded almost instantly and he pushed himself up, bewildered.

            “Oh. Oh, so…I guess you really  _can’t_  hurt me here,” he said, rotating his shoulder. The force should have smashed his bones to gravel, but he felt only a slight ache that eased quickly to nothing. “I was just kind of theorizing, but…”

            He turned and looked up at Scunner, who had turned away from him in silent dismissal. Blind anger made him want to run after it, but he caught himself. Being thrown around like a ragdoll wasn’t the way he wanted to spend his last moments.

            The thought prickled painfully at the back of his mind, drenching him in cold sweat.  _Last moments_. Far beyond him already, Scunner paused and began to cough again. It hacked dryly for a moment, then retched. Blood splattered on the ground and pooled at its feet, and with a strangled sound its legs collapsed out from under it and it fell heavily.

            “Let me go,” Newt said, whispering it to himself like a prayer. “Let me go. I don’t want to die with you. Let me go.”

            A sharp, acidic burn filled his mouth and he choked, spitting reflexively. The reek of ammonia made him dizzy and he rubbed frantically at his lips. Blue, luminous blood oozed from his mouth, flecked with droplets of red. He stared at it in shock, watching it drip from his fingers to the ground.

           

 

* * *

 

 

            “What do you mean he’s stopped moving?”

            “He was pacing around in his cell for a bit, sir,” the brig guard said quickly, jogging to keep up with Herc as he marched down the corridor to Newt’s cell. “He was getting aggressive again, y’know, with the growling? Then he got quiet. I looked in to see what he was doing and he was huddled up against the wall. Hasn’t moved for hours.”

            “Hours?” Herc stopped midstride, wheeling around to look at the guard. “What the hell do you mean  _hours?_  Why didn’t you call me down here the minute this started?”

            “I  _did_ , sir,” the guard said. “But you were…”

            “Busy,” Herc said, sighing. After his conversation with Gottlieb, Herc’s first action had been to file a request for rights to salvage in Oblivion Bay. The political shitstorm that had brewed with the UN not even an hour later had kept him holed up in his office for most of the day. Tendo had left him several urgent messages that he had yet to look at; for all he knew, another Breach was opening and he just didn’t have the time to address it.

            Three guards and a medic were waiting by Newt’s cell, watching the Marshall approach. Herc nodded towards the door. “Anything?”

            “I peeked in,” the medic said. “He’s breathing, at least.”

            “Open the door.”

            The cell door creaked open loudly but Newt didn’t look up. He sat against the wall with his legs drawn up to his chest, arms thrown over his head. His hands were knotted with a white-knuckled grip in his hair and his breath came in rasping spurts. The medic looked from him to Herc uneasily.

            “I’ll go first,” he said. “Doctor Geiszler?”

            Newt’s hands knotted tighter in his hair, and Herc saw that he was shivering uncontrollably. He crept closer, kneeling down beside him.

            “Newton,” he said quietly. “C’mon now. Look at me.”

            Newt sucked in a rattling breath. Certain he was about to have his fingers bitten off, Herc touched Newt’s shoulder and shook him lightly.

            “Alright, fine.  _Scunner,_ ” he whispered, trying to hide the hatred in his voice. “Look at me. I know you can hear me.”

            Newt’s hands began to ease in their twisting grip, and his head moved slightly towards the sound of Herc’s voice. His eyes were bloodshot and watery, staring past the Marshall.

            “Jesus, look at the state of you,” Herc said. He waved the medic over and she approached, holding her bag in front of her like it was a shield. She eased Newt’s arms down to his side and he sat docile and still, staring at the wall over Herc’s shoulder.

            “He bit the last guy who tried to do this,” the medic remarked dryly, taking out a penlight. “I want hazard pay if he takes something off.”

            She clicked the penlight on, shining it into Newt’s left eye.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

            “Jeez! What the  _shit!”_

Newt rubbed at his eyes frantically, dazzled by the painful light that left his vision spotty, turning around in a circle in a vain attempt to find the source. Scunner was still crumpled and wheezing on the ground yards away, blood splashing out of its mouth with every cough.

            “What the hell _was_ that?” he muttered to himself, rubbing at his eyes again. The blood drying on his hands left sticky streaks on his face and he gave an aggravated growl as he tried to wipe it off. The light burst again in his right eye and he swung his hand out reflexively.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

            The penlight clattered across the room and the medic fell back with a startled gasp.

            “Don’t do that,” Herc said sharply, shaking Newt’s shoulder. “Let her check you out. Do you-”

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

_understand me? Let her work._

            Newt froze, looking around again. That hadn’t been a fragment of echoing memory. That had sounded like the…

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

“…Marshall?”

“ _Newton!”_

Herc shifted in front of Newt, taking him by both shoulders and trying to catch his eye. The shivering was starting to ease, though a thick nosebleed was oozing down Newt’s face, painting a dark stripe over his lips and down his chin.

“Newt, look at me,” Herc said urgently. “Are you alright?”

            “No,” Newt said, though Herc could hear the incredulous humor in his weak voice. “N…no, I’m… _not.”_

“Stupid question, right,” Herc said, smiling despite himself. “What’s happening? Can you…what’s going  _on?_ ”

            Newt’s mouth moved silently and he suddenly coughed, hands clutching at his chest. The shivering came back with terrible force, and Newt shook as though in the throes of a seizure.

            “Newt? Newt, no,  _no_ , c’mon,” Herc pleaded. “Don’t do this, don’t  _do this!”_

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

            Newt fell to the ground, pain like fire lancing through his chest. His heart pounded rapidly and he couldn’t get a breath in. Scunner writhed and coughed far beyond him, and the sounds it made were anguished.

             _I’m dying,_  Newt thought, perfectly clear through the pain.  _It’s killing me._

_painpainpainfear          alonealonealone abandoned    alone homehomehomehome_

Scunner’s frantic thoughts howled in Newt’s mind and the noise of it was unbearable. He curled up and pressed his hands to his ears, gritting his teeth against the noise, the burning pain, all of it. The kaiju’s terror was like an infection eating through him, and he let out a sob.

           

             _painpainpain death dyingdyingdying dying alone dying home want home want_

             _Let me go,_  Newt begged.  _Let me go. Don’t take me with you._

He could hear his heart pounding in tandem with the frantic, erratic beats of the hivemind. Scunner thrashed and turned to Fiend, to Spinejackal, to Slattern. It raised its massive head and shrieked, clawing at the ground in defeat and grief. Newt watched it with eyes that could barely focus, pain eating away at him.

             _Let me go let me go let me go_

            Slattern drew a deep breath and roared, and blood cascaded from its mouth. It shuddered one last time, and with a soft, terrible sound, it collapsed.

 And it died.

            Newt felt its death like a wound ripping through him, and the world went dark.

           

* * *

 

 

            “Marshall!”

            “ _Not now!”_

            “Sir, we-”

            Herc rounded on the new guard standing at the door, furious.

            “ _What the hell is so important_?” he roared. The guard paled, wide-eyed and shrinking.

            “Officer Choi radioed me to find you, sir. The  _kaiju_ , sir. It’s  _dead_. It started seizing up on the dock and…”

            In his grip, Newt had gone disturbingly still. Herc looked from the guard to him in dawning horror.

            “Newt,” he said. “Newt, please. Don’t. Not you too, you fucking bastard.  _Wake up.”_

He shook Newt’s shoulders frantically, and the medic pushed him firmly away. She eased Newt to the floor and Herc stood, backing away and feeling as though the breath had been knocked out of him.

            “When?” he asked the guard.

            “A minute or two ago, sir. Officer Choi had people watching in case something changed. It started to cough, then it just…its  _insides_  were coming out through its mouth and...”

            It took every scrap of willpower Herc had to force his face to calm. The medic was hovering over Newt, doing things Herc couldn’t see and couldn’t process. He was too still. He wasn’t breathing, wasn’t moving, wasn’t doing  _anything._ Herc stared at Newt –  _he’s not dead don’t let him be dead too –_ backing out of the room until he found himself standing aimlessly in the hall.

            “Sir, what should we do?” the guard asked. Herc stared at him blankly. “What do we do?”

            Herc blinked and shook his head slowly, trying to process the question. Do? What should they _do?_

            “Sir…?”

            Inside the cell, Newt gave a horrible, wracking cough. Herc jolted and shoved past the guard, relief replacing the terrible, sick confusion so quickly he could barely think. The medic was helping Newt sit up, dabbing at the nosebleed as it dripped down his face.

            “ _Newton._ ”

            Newt blinked muzzily, looking around and focusing with effort on Herc. He looked dazed as though recovering from a blow to the head.

            “Oh,” he said, voice ragged with exhaustion. “Hey, Marshall.”

 

 

 

 


	21. Chapter 21

21.

 

            “ _We have been trying to reach you for three days, Marshall.”_

Herc stood at ease, his dress uniform so freshly pressed he could still feel the lingering heat of the iron. He smiled pleasantly at the UN representatives glowering at him.

            “I apologize for the lapse in communication,” he said. “We’ve been busy over here. And I  _did_  need to catch up on some sleep.”

            “ _The change in your attitude is refreshing, at least,_ ” the French rep said dryly. “ _We have been going over the reports you and several of your people submitted to us, Marshall Hansen. There are some very…outlandish claims.”_

“Ah. You must mean the bit about the four-hundred-foot tall alien monster possessing one of my lead scientists and warning us about the end of the world,” Herc replied politely. “Yes, that  _could_  be a bit hard to swallow.”

            “ _Do try not to be so flippant, sir. We have lived through extraordinary times, but there are some things that strain the imagination.”_

“My apologies. But really, there isn’t any prettier language to describe the week we’ve been having,” Herc said. “And I assure you. It has been a very,  _very_  long week.”

            “ _Undoubtedly,”_ the Canadian rep said. “ _What is the status on the kaiju’s removal?”_

            “We’ve packed up as much of Scunner as we could and it is on it’s way to Pitcairn Island as we speak. We also kept several samples for Doctor Geiszler to study.”

            “ _Yes,_ ” the UK rep said uneasily. “ _We’ve had some concerns regarding Doctor Geiszler we were hoping to discuss with you.”_

            “Oh?”

            “ _Are you entirely sure he is still competent for active duty, Marshall? This…unusual trauma he has been through must surely have affected him adversely.”_

            “You want to know if he’s cracked or not,” Herc said mildly. “Doctor Geiszler is more resilient than people give him credit for. Myself included. He requested time for recovery and we all expect him back to work after his respite.”

            “ _Marshall…you do understand our concerns that his time under the kaiju’s influence may have compromised him?”_  the French rep asked. “ _This is not a situation any of us are familiar with. He may be damaged more severely than you think._ ”

            “I appreciate your concerns, but I do assure you we have everything in hand,” Herc said, an edge of finality in his tone. “We have faced some  _very_  strange problems before, and we generally tend to come out the other side cleanly. No one has ever Drifted with a kaiju before so it’s fitting that one of the foremost experts in K-Science was the one to do it.”

             _“You can understand why we are hesitant to trust your judgment-”_

“And I’m supposed to trust yours?”

            The representatives went deadly silent, all of them staring at Herc. He was the picture of calm, hands clasped behind his back.

            “ _What are you saying, Marshall?_ ” the Italian rep said icily. “ _And I suggest you explain yourself carefully._ ”

            Herc gave a small smile, looking from screen to screen at the affronted people staring back at him.

            “It was under the UN’s recommendations that the Jaeger program be decommissioned in favor of useless barricades, to placate the people who have you in their pockets,” Herc said, and his voice was dangerously soft. “How’s that view inland? It must be peaceful, right? How long do you think those walls would have kept the kaiju out? They weren’t going to stop at the coastlines, their directive was to destroy  _everything._ ”

             _“That’s enough, Marshall.”_

            “No, I don’t think it is,” Herc said. “ _War_  is coming, and I am done kowtowing to you people. I need cooperation and the assurance that when I make a decision that is going to  _protect people,_  you are not going to hedge and throw excuses in my face why it can’t be done.  _You_  do not have to do anything.  _We_  will do it for you _,_ like we’ve done from the start _._ And you are going to need us more than you know. _”_

            The silence took on a tone of shock and anger, and Herc gave them a disarming smile.  

             _“You seem to know a lot about this supposed new invasion,_ ” the American rep said tightly. “ _May we remind you that your intel is coming from a man with a history of manic instability?_ ”

            “As you’ve never  _once_  set foot on the front lines, I can understand why you’re not willing to accept that logic can be stretched,” Herc said. “You don’t know any of us. But you do know that we’ve done our jobs, and  _all of us_  have done them admirably. Doctor Geiszler is no exception so I would ask you give him the respect he’s earned.”

            He leaned back against his desk and studied them. On more than one representative’s face, the anger and affront was fading to uncertainty. It wasn’t belief, not yet, but Herc was willing to work on it.

            “So. Now that we’ve got all  _that_  off the table, let’s discuss Jaeger salvage rights in Oblivion Bay…”

 

 

            The air smelled like salt and chemicals. Newt sat on the edge of the helipad wrapped up in a parka several sizes too big and watched the ocean. Most people were avoiding him but he didn’t really mind; people always made one excuse or another to avoid him if they could. He had gotten so used to being the odd man out that the people who skirted around him and whispered behind their hands now didn’t bother him much at all.

            He  _had_  sent “Sorry I Tried to Kill You” cards to several people in the medical bay, though. People appreciated little bits of consideration like that.  

            The cold wind churned the ocean into whitecaps, the water iron grey and opaque. The chemical smell hit Newt in the face like a slap and he wrinkled his nose against it; the chemical cocktail to neutralize Kaiju Blue was a quick, efficient process after so many years learning how to contain it, but it wasn’t a pleasant one.

            Newt glanced towards the patch of smashed and ruined concrete where Scunner had laid. It had stained the ground blue and black as it rotted alive, and there was another team of maintenance workers trying without success to hose it clean. The kaiju had done a great deal of damage without even trying. Newt didn’t even want to think of how much it would cost to repair everything it had reduced to rubble.

            A faint, remembered taste of ammonia flooded his mouth as he stared at the stains of dried blood and rotted flesh, and Newt had to look away. He half-expected to hear Scunner muttering in the back of his mind, the constant stream of voiceless words pushing his own thoughts to the side until he couldn’t focus on anything else. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath as he tried to center himself. He was alone. There was silence, but it was nothing to be afraid of.

            So bent on focusing on the silence and isolation, Newt was startled when he sensed someone behind him. His eyes opened and he looked over his shoulder.

            “That’s  _my_  coat, you know.”

            “You’ve got like  _twenty_  of ‘em, Hermann,” Newt said, looking up at Gottlieb and smiling slightly. “You can spare one. It’s freezing out.”

            Gottlieb made a disapproving noise at odds with the amused look on his face, and he carefully eased himself down to sit beside Newt. He rested his cane across his lap, looking at the water. The wind picked up a bit, the chill biting at their faces.

            “Anything out there?”

            Newt shook his head.

            “Not from what I can tell.”

            “So what are you looking for?”

            “Nothing.” Newt shrugged. “Didn’t want to stick around inside. Too many people flinch when I look at them.”

            “Forget them. They’ll get over themselves eventually.”

            Newt grinned tiredly, shrugging again.

            “Hey, it’s no big deal. Going from rock star savior-of-the-world to sideshow freak in less than a week’s a big accomplishment.”

            “Forget them,” Gottlieb repeated, putting a hand on Newt’s shoulder and giving him a shake. “They’re not important.”

            Newt looked at him, the grin turning more genuine.

            “You’re just saying that ‘cause you  _love_ me,” he said, drawing out the word like a song. Gottlieb choked, startled into laughter and nearly dropping his cane into the water. He fumbled for it and Newt caught it, setting it down between them.

            “You are the most deplorable person I’ve ever met,” Gottlieb said, trying and failing to stop a smile. “I should have just pushed you off the dock.”

            “And when I started to drown you’d jump in and save me, right?”

            “I’d stand by the sidelines and salute you as you sank.”

            “That’s  _cold,_ ” Newt laughed, shaking his head. “What’d I ever do to you?”

            “It would take me a  _week_ to answer that properly.”

            The wind picked up, sending the waves to batter against the Shatterdome’s walls, kicking up sprays of mist that were slowly soaking them. Breakers farther out to sea roared and crashed, punctuated by the shrill calls of gulls.

            “That ocean is not silent,” Gottlieb murmured. Newt glanced at him.

            “Huh?”

            “ _Blue, green, grey, white or black,”_  Gottlieb intoned, gesturing towards the water. “ _Smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.”_

            “That’s…wow. How long have you been waiting to break that one out?”

            “ _Three_  years,” Gottlieb said, grinning. “The proper opportunity never arose.”

            “What is that, Lovecraft?”

            “Mmhm.”

            Newt laughed, shaking his head again.

            “I am genuinely embarrassed to know you. I can’t be seen with you in public anymore.”

            Gottlieb snorted, grabbing for his cane. Newt stood first and offered his hand, hoisting Gottlieb up.

            “My thanks, Doctor Geiszler,” he said, adjusting his coat in mock primness.

            “But of  _course_ , Doctor Gottlieb,” Newt replied in a terrible English accent. He bowed stiffly from the waist, sweeping an arm towards the open bay doors. “Shall we?”

            “If you’re going to be obnoxious I’m just going to ignore you.”

            “Oh, please. You  _live_  for me to annoy you.”

            They bickered all the way back into the Shatterdome, and if the crowds of people parted around Newt as he approached, neither one noticed, or cared.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's it.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who's taken the time to read; this was my first real venture into writing fanfiction, and having so many people enjoy it as much as they have has been a wonderful experience for me as a writer and fan of Pacific Rim. I haven't had this much fun writing in ages, and I hope to do it again soon.
> 
> Thank you again for reading. <3
> 
> UPDATE 3/24/16 - I finally edited the story for its intended final version! There haven't been too many changes, but there was grammar editing as well as some small tweaks to the narrative to make it flow better. Enjoy!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Don't Leave Me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/966705) by [feriowind](https://archiveofourown.org/users/feriowind/pseuds/feriowind)
  * [That Ocean Is Not Silent [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6710851) by [tinypinkmouse_podfic (tinypinkmouse)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tinypinkmouse/pseuds/tinypinkmouse_podfic)




End file.
